Ivy Baldwin Dance Presents KEEN (PART 2) At Abron Arts Center, 6/1-11

Choreographer Ivy Baldwin's latest work, Keen (Part 2), is a meditation on loss and ritual. This new dance for the Abrons Playhouse builds upon Baldwin's recent Keen (Part 1) for the Philip Johnson Glass House in New Canaan, CT, and is co-presented by the Abrons Arts Center, The Chocolate Factory Theater, and The Joyce Theater as part of Joyce Unleashed, the Joyce Theater's off-site series for experimental dance. Performances are June 1-11, 2017 (Thursdays through Saturdays at 8pm, and Sundays at 2pm).

Keen (Part 2) grows out of an open-eyed exploration of that which we uncomfortably avoid: the contours of grief. Juxtaposing ancient rites of mourning with threads inspired by such disparate sources as Paul Klee's illustrations for Voltaire and Irish traditions of keening and windalls with new rites, inherited and invented, the dancers mine the emotional and physical experience of loss, memory, and holding love. Adhering to and departing from formal dance structures, the dancers cultivate a world that shifts between seemingly opposing states: mundane and otherworldly, human and animal, lamenting and salutary. Keen (Part 2) includes an immersive installation of stark white paper created by acclaimed artists Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen. Sound design is by Baldwin's longtime collaborator Justin Jones, with lighting design by Chloe Z. Brown and costumes by Mindy Nelson.

Keen (Part 2) is performed by Ivy Baldwin, Eleanor Smith, and Katie Workum, with Anna Adams Stark, Katie Dean, Dia Dearstyne,Heather Olson, Kay Ottinger, Tara Sheena, Edisa Weeks, Marya Wethers, and Tara Willis.

Keen (Part 2) is co-commissioned by the Abrons Arts Center, The Chocolate Factory Theater, and The Joyce Theater. Additional support has been provided by the Jerome Foundation, the William and Karen Tell Foundation, Ivy Baldwin Dance Commissioning Circle, and residencies at Mount Tremper Arts and Abrons Arts Center.

Tickets are $20 and can be purchased through Abrons Arts Center's box office at 212-352-3101, or online at www.abronsartscenter.org. Abrons Arts Center is located at 466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street) in Manhattan. F train to Delancey; J/M to Essex; B/D to Grand; M14A to Pitt Street.

About the Artists

Ivy Baldwin is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, performer, teacher, and founder of Ivy Baldwin Dance. Since 1999, her work has been presented and commissioned in the U.S. by the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM Next Wave Festival), the Philip Johnson Glass House (CT), American Dance Institute (MD), the Wooden Floor (CA), and in New York City by Dance Theater Workshop, New York Live Arts, La MaMa, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Dixon Place, Symphony Space, Performance Space 122, among others, and internationally at Tanz im August (Germany) and Dans Contemporan International Dance Festival (Romania). Baldwin is the recipient of many awards including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (2014, Choreography), Bogliasco Foundation, and MacDowell Colony, artist-in-residence positions with BAM, Movement Research, Abrons Arts Center, and ArtistNe(s)t (Romania), and creative residencies at MASS MoCA, Mount Tremper Arts, Kaatsbaan International Dance Center, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She has also received support from the Jerome Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the William and Karen Tell Foundation, among others. Baldwin has been a guest artist and adjunct faculty at numerous colleges and universities including Barnard College, New York University, North Carolina School of the Arts, The New School, and Rutgers University, among others. www.ivybaldwindance.org

Chloë Z. Brown is thrilled to be the new production manager for the Lewis Center for the Arts, Programs in Dance and Theater at Princeton University. She was the Director of Production at New York Live Arts and Dance Theater Workshop (DTW) from 2002 to 2013. As a lighting designer, she collaborates with Ivy Baldwin, Laurie Berg, Andrew Dinwiddie, Jeanine Durning, Sarah Maxfield, Juliana May, David Neumann, Heather Olson, Brian Rogers, Vicky Shick, Chris Yon, and many others. In 2005, she was honored with a New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Award for her lighting of Amanda Loulaki's La la la la, Resistance (The Island of Breezes) at DTW.

Justin Jones is a dancer, choreographer, sound designer, and educator. He has danced with Body Cartography Project, Chris Schlichting, Morgan Thorson, Karen Sherman, and Chris Yon, and was a member of Tere O'Connor Dance Company from 2001 to 2004. His choreography has been presented in Minneapolis at Bryant Lake Bowl, Red Eye, the Southern Theater, and the Walker Art Center; and in New York at the Thalia, La MaMa, and EMPAC, among others. Jones creates sound design for his own work and for other dance makers including Ivy Baldwin, Body Cartography Project, Chris Schlichting, and Chris Yon. He holds a BFA in dance from NYU, was a Cowles Chair visiting artist at the University of Minnesota dance program in 2014, and is the recipient of a 2007 McKnight Fellowship for Choreography.

Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen have collaborated since 2005 on more than a dozen works using paper as their primary medium. The works range from large sculptural objects to warehouse-size immersive environments that suggest layers of earth, old-growth forests, or the flow of a glacier. www.stripedcanary.com

Mindy Nelson is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she studied dance and business/economics. In New York, she has designed costumes for a variety of local theater and children's productions as well as dance works by Ivy Baldwin, Melissa Briggs, Netta Yerushalmy, Mimi Garrard, Shannon Hummel, Nicholas Leichter, and Katie Workum, among others. After years of dancing, teaching, and costuming on the East Coast, Nelson moved back to her home state of California in 2012 where she lives in Santa Barbara with her family. She continues to design costumes for dance locally and in New York City while operating her sewing/design business.

About the Presenters

The Abrons Arts Center is the 2014 Obie Award-winning performing and visual arts program of the Henry Street Settlement. The Abrons supports the creation and presentation of bold multidisciplinary work; cultivates artists in all stages of their practice through residencies, educational programs, and commissions; and serves as an international intersection of cultural engagement for artists and audiences. Each year, the Abrons offers more than 250 performances, 12 gallery exhibitions, and 25 residencies for emerging and international performing and visual artists. The Abrons also provides New York City public schools with teaching artists, involving more than 3,000 students annually. www.abronsartscenter.org

Since it was founded in 2005, The Chocolate Factory Theater has supported the development and presentation of new work by a community of local, national, and international artists working in dance, theater, performance, and multimedia. The Chocolate Factory's programs have drawn many thousands of new visitors to its 5,000-square-foot industrial facility in Long Island City, Queens. The organization is currently planning for the purchase and renovation of a permanent facility in the neighborhood. The Chocolate Factory is artist-founded and artist-led. Artistic Director Brian Rogers continues to create and present his own work at The Chocolate Factory while providing support to a close-knit community of forward-thinking visiting artists working at all stages of their careers. The Chocolate Factory received an Obie grant in 2009. www.chocolatefactorytheater.org

Joyce Unleashed, a series of experimental work for intimate spaces, began in 2014 with the goal of presenting contemporary performance by emerging artists from New York and beyond. Now entering its fourth season, the series has previously featured the work of zoe|juniper (Seattle), Laurie Berg (Brooklyn), SuperGroup (Minneapolis), Yossi Berg & Oded Graf (Tel Aviv), Hillel Kogan (Tel Aviv), Netta Yerushalmy (New York), Vanessa Anspaugh (Brooklyn), Anna Sperber (Brooklyn), and Elina Pirinen (Helsinki).

The Joyce Theater Foundation, a nonprofit organization, has proudly served the dance community for over three decades. Under the direction of founders Cora Cahan and Eliot Feld, Ballet Tech Foundation acquired and The Joyce renovated the Elgin Theater in Chelsea. Opening as The Joyce Theater in 1982, it was named in honor of Joyce Mertz, beloved daughter of LuEsther T. Mertz. It was LuEsther Mertz's clear, undaunted vision and abundant generosity that made it imaginable and ultimately possible to build the theater. Ownership was secured by The Joyce in 2015. The theater is one of the only theaters built by dancers for dance, and it has provided an intimate and elegant home for over 385 U.S.-based and international companies. The Joyce has also presented dance at Lincoln Center since 2012, and launched Joyce Unleashed in 2014 to feature emerging and experimental artists. To further support the creation of new work, The Joyce maintains longstanding commissioning and residency programs. Local students and teachers (K-12) benefit from its school program, and family and adult audiences get closer to dance with access to artists. The Joyce's annual season of about 48 weeks of dance now includes more than 340 performances for audiences in excess of 150,000. www.joyce.org

Major support for The Joyce's presentation of emerging and experimental artists through Joyce Unleashed provided by The Harkness Foundation for Dance.

Joyce Unleashed is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature as well as supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. Additional funding generously provided by leadership support from theLuEsther T. Mertz Charitable Trust; major support from the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the SHS Foundation, and the Shubert Foundation; and key support from The Jerome Robbins Foundation.

To post a comment, you must register and login.