Performance Space New York to Present Storyboard P's NO DIVING 2

Performance Space New York will present Storyboard P's No Diving 2, April 7 and 8 at 7pm in the organization's courtyard (150 1st Avenue; tickets available here). Rain dates are April 14 and 15. With No Diving 2, the dancer-whose inimitable Flex-derived dance he dubs Mutant and equates to juggling light-returns to Performance Space (having previously performed at the organization's 2018 Gala) with two freestyle solo performances. These events are co-produced with Arika, the political arts organization from Scotland, UK, who Performance Space collaborated with on the I wanna be with you everywhere festival of disability aesthetics in 2019.

Storyboard P offers a revolutionary understanding of gravity, in which bodies are sanctuaries that float-able to teleport, disappear, appear.

Storyboard P's dancing reminds us that our conventional understandings of what a human body is, what it can do, and where it starts and ends, are insufficient. As an acclaimed street dancer Storyboard's lineage is Flex, but as an artist he might be more of an Afrofuturist. Using an otherworldly combination of skill, beauty, poetry, and emotion his dancing collapses space and time into an alternative universe. Storyboard P treats dance as a way to speak without speaking, a slang of movement that can carry vibrations like the animation of a stop motion film.

In Storyboard's own words: "My style is Mutant. As a mutant my power is to project a sequence of images through my body that tells an elaborate story to music. The power to storyboard / ballet / jazz / African / contemporary / bruk up / flex / boogaloo. My earliest inspirations were stop motion films. And watching the locals get down in Brooklyn. My vision was to bring the golden age of motion picture to the streets...I aimed to conceptualize all of my earliest street dance battles into theatrical style productions with movie scores and theatrical music. And, I became this Ray Harryhausen / Tim Burton style creature, but only dancing to music. This was my illusion and my goal was to epitomize this presentation."

About Storyboard P

Storyboard P is a new state-of-the-art model of performance art. Dubbed "the Basquiat of street dance" by The New Yorker, he's elevating the genre and conversation while creating a new lexicon along the way. Using an otherworldly combination of skill, beauty, poetry, and emotion, Storyboard P has pushed street dancing in a more mature direction he terms "visual recording." With the frame-by-frame precision of an animator and the awe-inducing wizardry of a special-effects artist, he communicates real life through dance. Instead of wowing his audience, he casts a spell on them.

About Arika

Arika are a political arts organization based in Scotland, UK, who organize live spaces that seek to explore the inseparable, intertwined nature of aesthetics and social life.

We see our role in this unfolding relationship as celebrating and supporting connections between art and social change. When we say art, we mean the ways we sing and dance together, the ways we listen and want to be heard, how we look and hope to be seen, how we think of our bodies and how we move through space, how we feel and want to be felt, for example.

We currently do this through a programme of public events in Glasgow called Episodes comprising performances, discussions, screenings and collective learning. Developing iteratively, each informing the next, they often involve watching, listening, talking or dancing together. They are a continuation, through friendship and solidarity, of conversations we are entangled in both locally and internationally. Especially, Episodes are committed to experiments in a sociality that goes beyond personhood and that propose new ways of living in the world today, born of collective desires and struggle.

Our Local Organising programme co-operates closely with specific groups who are pushing back against the violence of racist borders, poverty and criminalisation of sex work, taking their lead on and then resourcing projects and events they want to see happen.

In partnership with sex worker-led groups in the UK and the ICA London, we are currently presenting: Decriminalised Futures, a group exhibition featuring thirteen International Artists whose work speaks to the multiplicity of contemporary sex worker experiences.

Internationally, Arika participated in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, and has since collaborated regularly on projects in New York with members of the Arbert Santana Freedom and Free School from within the House|Ballroom community and sex worker-led groups in the city, with partners including: MoMA PS1, The New School, Issue Project Rooms and Union Theological Seminary amongst others. In 2019 we collaborated with a steering group of leading artists from disability community and Performance Space New York on I wanna be with you everywhere, a 4-day festival of disabled artistry and disability's entanglements with race, class, and gender.

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