Pioneers Go East Collective Announces The 2025 OUT-FRONT! Festival
Presented in partnership with BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) and Judson Church, January 7-13, 2025.
Pioneers Go East Collective has announced the lineup for the third edition of the Out-FRONT! Festival, January 7-13, 2025.
Centering LGBTQ+ and feminist voices, the festival features the work of artists exploring bold new performance modes for a lively exchange of art and culture. The 2025 festival features performances by Miranda Brown + Noa Rui-Piin Weiss, Blaze Ferrer, Kyle Marshall Choreography, Stuart B Meyers, Angie Pittman, jill sigman/thinkdance, and Nattie Trogdon + Hollis Bartlett.
The festival will also include six dance and experimental short films as part of the Out FRONT! Film Series on January 11. The 2025 festival is presented by Pioneers Go East Collective in partnership with BAM and Judson Church.
This season Pioneers Go East Collective has expanded its producing and curatorial team. In addition to Artistic Director Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte and designer Philip Treviño, the cohort includes cultural organizer Remi Harris and Joyce Isabelle, a cultural organizer who has been with the collective since its inception. The Out-FRONT! Film Series is curated by Daniel Diaz, another longtime member of the collective.
“The Out-FRONT! Festival is now in its third year and is here to stay! As a grassroots artist-driven collective, we create a high-visibility platform for dance and interdisciplinary artists whose rigorous, playful, and fabulously outrageous creative practices speak to our community in unexpected and beautiful ways,” said Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte. “We engage known and lesser-known artists to shape a joyful space to celebrate queer art, and stories of vulnerability and inclusion. We are psyched to be back at Judson Church, a historic space that served as our first home for curatorial practice in 2017. This season, we are also grateful for the partnership with BAM, where we were artists-in-residence in 2023. We are resilient and continue to be an accessible festival for artists and audiences alike.”
Out-FRONT 2025 will take place at BAM Fisher Hillman Studio (321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn, NY 11217) and Judson Church (55 Washington Square South, New York, NY 10012).
All festival events are free with a suggested donation of $25. Reservations are required and can be made online at https://www.eventbrite.com/o/pioneers-go-east-collective-32986072425.
2025 Out-FRONT! Festival Schedule
Tuesday, January 7, and Friday, January 10, at 7pm
Split Bill:
Miranda Brown + Noa Rui-Piin Weiss
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Nattie Trogdon + Hollis Bartlett
Vessels
Judson Church
Run time: 65 minutes
Brooklyn-based collaborators Miranda Brown + Noa Rui-Piin Weiss investigate the intersection of choreography, absurdity, and internet culture. In !!simon says~~!:));)$$ they follow instructions and they fail at following instructions. They write: “We are described. We are indescribable. We steal the Declaration of Independence. We face our fears on the dance floor. We leave with no fears.”
Vessels, created by Nattie Trogdon + Hollis Bartlett, is a work of memory and from memory—part fantastical dream state and part mundane maneuver. Two performers draw on a shared archive of material from pop culture, bodily memory, and instinctual responses, blurring the legibility of their embodied histories and personal desires. Distorting and repeating these forms, however horrific or ecstatic, in the pursuit of something that feels like transformation or preservation or simply just aliveness. Vessels is a dance of desperate meanings unraveling into some queer itch that feels like home.
Wednesday, January 8, and Thursday, January 9, at 7pm
jill sigman/thinkdance
Re-Seeding (Encounter #4)
Judson Church
Run time: 50 minutes
Continuing Jill Sigman's movement, sound, and visual research practices, Re-Seeding (Encounter #4) is a rigorous, ritual-based process grounded in an exploration of our interconnectedness to land and each other. It grows out of Sigman's many years of making dances and installations about environmental and social justice issues. Building on this, Re-Seeding asks what it could mean for humans to “re-seed” themselves on land where they are not native—land that has been colonized and occupied—in a way that moves toward healing. What would it mean to understand the past and aspire toward collective well-being? What can those living in diaspora learn from plants that root themselves in new places and contribute to ecosystems in positive ways? In essence, it is a search for a better way to live on and with this land and its history.
Friday, January 10, at 8:30pm and Monday, January 13, at 7pm
Split Bill:
Blaze Ferrer
Dick Biter
Stuart B Meyers
thegarden.exc
Judson Church
Run time: 75 minutes
Dick Biter is a dance that mourns the death of punk while channeling its contemporary detritus. Using deconstructed drag movement, Mylar-fringed butt plugs, traffic cones, and Fiona Apple's 1997 VMA speech as a springboard, Dick Biter collages dance scores and texts to embody both the divine femme and butch, and propose a space for abrasive, seat-forward revelry. Created and performed by Blaze Ferrer, and performed and generated with Joey Kipp and Alex Romania. Guitar by Alex Romania, lighting design by Ebony M. Burton, sound design and composition by Jeff Aaron Bryant, and costume design by Emily White.
Stuart B Meyers's thegarden.exc is an abstract movement exploration of the ever-becoming nature of the body and its outer world. As a blueprint for technological invention, the corporeal reveals itself to be a glitching system—one that is ripe for repair, updates, and visioning. By constantly and consciously reconnecting to the body as organic material, the dance wrestles with rediscovering the supportive, unseen forces that sustain us. It moves to remember the spiritual processes and practices that ground our ability to build gleaming futures.
Saturday, January 11, at 7pm
Split Bill:
Kyle Marshall Choreography
Joan (NYC Premiere)
Angie Pittman
Black Life Chord Changes
BAM Fisher Hillman Studio
Run time: 80 minutes
Kyle Marshall's Joan is a quartet celebrating power over tyranny, motivated by Julius Eastman's bold score for 10 cellos, “The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc.” The story of Joan, a young female warrior who is called by God to lead her army to victory against an occupying oppressor, is central to this dance. The French origins of this legend are reinterpreted to remember the history of the Maroons, Seminoles, and other communities of revolutionary people who fought for their freedom against slavery and colonial rule in the Americas. Flanking Joan are three soldiers symbolizing the spirits of her ancestors who guide and fight by her side. There is victory in the air and an eternal flame in their heart as these four figures defend their ground, elude the enemy, and fortify themselves in Eastman's relentlessly fiery score. Performed by Justin Daniels, Taína Lyons, Kellye Smith, and Sydney Worthy. Eastman's score is performed by Seth Parker Woods. Original lighting design by Serena Wong. Costume design, hair, and makeup by Edo Tastic. Joan is part of Kyle Marshall's Julius Eastman trilogy.
Angie Pittman's reprised evening-length solo performance (broken into scores for “day” and “night”) uses dance improvisation—skillfully pulling from and synthesizing, folk traditions of liturgical dancing, soul line dancing, Umfundalai, and postmodern improvisation—with layers of sung and spoken text, patient listening, and recorded sound to open an experimental, improvised movement portal. Through these visceral Black womanist traditions, Black Life Chord Changes slips in and out of deep listening, seeing, improvisation, and truth telling. Choreographed and performed by Angie Pittman. Composer: Cody Jensen. Lighting design by Tuçe Yasak. Recording artists: Tiffany Williams, Carla E. Jones, and Aaron (A+) Wilson. Arrangement: Ther'Up.Y. Lyricist: Angie Pittman.
2025 OUT-FRONT! Film Series
Saturday, January 11, 3-5pm
Judson Church
The Out-FRONT! Film Series will include six dance and experimental short films by Dominique Castelano, Jueun Kang, Kathleen Kelly, Haley Morgan Miller, Pioneers Go East Collective, and Maamoun Tobbo.
The screening will include a talkback with the artists.
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