Join us at AS220 for the 2nd Annual Modern Movements Dance Festival Mixed Bill featuring four sets of emerging and mid-career artists pushing the form of dance to its’ extreme! Please note this show is not handicap accessible and will take place on all three floors of the AS220 95 Empire Theatre/Dance Complex. Get ready for some real Modern Movements! Performances include:
Walk the (pink) Elephant, by Denizen Arts (Yon Tande + Jude Sandy) is an exploration of absence and a ritual of reckoning and regeneration in the face of cataclysmic loss. It memorializes and opens ground in the wake of multiple generations of (often queer) artists of color decimated by HIV/AIDS due to lack of resources (health, familial, social and others).
In“Instructions for the Safe Delivery of the Royal Knee,” Orlando Hernandez continues a series of performances that I’ve been developing through tap dance and text. I’m interested in exploring and complicating Spanish and US histories and histories of the Caribbean diaspora, and I believe that percussive dance can help generate environments of resistance against persistent colonialism and racial violence. This piece draws mainly from two texts, “El Requerimiento,” a legal and religious contract that Spaniards were required to read to native peoples before attacking them; and The Indian Militia, by Captain Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, an anti-guerilla warfare manual written to help Spanish generals in their wars against Indians.
In Kaliede, Amorphous Dance Collective delves into concepts of weakness and strength. Inspired by natural sounds, images, and spoken-words, each dancer constructs a personal vignette that becomes woven into a larger narrative of potency and vulnerability. Created in a spirit of true collaboration, Kaliede’s dancers are also its creators. The dancers have varying backgrounds of technique, composition, and movement experience, which they draw from throughout the creative process.
Under the Shiny is the latest collaboration between Ali Kenner Brodsky and Andy Russ. Incorporating the work of ceramic artist Anna Highsmith, the piece is a playful dance-theater duet that may or may not know where it is going.