Featured image: Branko Brezovec “Confusions” | Photographer: Darko Vaupotić
The Queer New York International Arts Festival (QNYIA) is a festival of contemporary performance that explores and broadens the concept of queer (in) art ― returns for a third year with a diverse slate of performances by international artists, many presenting their work in New York City for the first time.
September 17 – 28
Please find the remaining schedule below. For additional information please visit www.queerny.org.
Bruno Isaković / Ana Vnučec (Croatia)
Denuded (U.S. Premiere)
Dance
Tuesday, September 23, 8pm
Abrons Arts Center Underground
$10 suggested donation / abronsartscenter.org
A constantly evolving piece, Denuded was created by choreographer and dancer Bruno Isaković in 2013, and performed by him in last year’s festival. This new version is interpreted and performed by dancer Ana Vnučec.Denuded is about the body, movement and stillness, breathing and, most importantly, about a constant contact with the audience. The confrontation of the naked body and the gaze is the work’s driving force. Isaković’scollaboration with Vnučec broadens the original work by taking into account the female body together with a different performing experience, at the same time playing with and emphasizing stereotypes and clichés that arise therein.
T.R.A.S.H. (The Netherlands)
T†Bernadette (U.S. Premiere)
Dance
Part of Dutch Focus
Wednesday, September 24, 8pm
Abrons Arts Center Experimental
$10 suggested donation / abronsartscenter.org
On the stage with a washing machine, several wigs, and lots of costumes, a man and a woman live out their relationship. This emotional dance-duet exposes ecstasy as a precondition for the merging of the two people, who are soon each wandering in their own world, losing themselves and each other. Through the daze of desire they encounter the dark, unknown sides of their personalities.
Jeremy Wade (U.S./Berlin) / Mark Tompkins (France)
Stardust (U.S. Premiere)
Dance
Wednesday, September 24 and Thursday, September 25, 9pm
Abrons Arts Center Underground
$10 suggested donation / abronsartscenter.org
With their personal passion, research in real time composition, and unidentified performative objects, the paths of Jeremy Wade and Mark Tompkins seemed bound to cross. It happened in 2012 at the Festival Densités where they spent the 24 hours preceding the performance telling stories, tuning and enumerating potential dances, music, costumes and states. Stardust was born.
Abel Azcona (Spain)
Someone Else (U.S. Premiere)
Performance
Thursday, September 25, 6pm
Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art
$10 suggested donation / www.leslielohman.org
Abel Azcona uses his body to illustrate personal experiences of abandonment, pain, and want of empathy. In Someone Else he shows us interpersonal relations, both sentimental and sexual, in which in a parallel way, true feelings, true love, or the true object of desire are all hidden. The artist shares different intimacies with different people, making the antagonist-guest the protagonist. He presents dreams that become true in the mind, but never in the actual body.
Mor Shani (Israel/The Netherlands)
Love-ism (U.S. Premiere)
Dance
Part of Dutch Focus
Thursday, September 25, 9pm
Abrons Arts Center Experimental
$10 suggested donation / abronsartscenter.org
Love-ism is a long-term study inspired by Erich Fromm’s seminal book, The Art of Loving. With this work Mor Shani takes a close look at the human experience of intimacy, challenging the perception and liquidity of the agreed upon, the sublime, and the condemned. The concept of Love-ism emerged from Shani’s personal need to reconnect to the community after three years of working in the hermetic surroundings of the studio and the production house. It is a reaction to the growing denial of the function of the arts in society, and grew out of the wish to expand the creative process beyond the premises of the professional field to be relevant to a larger audience and share not only a product, but also the act of making.
Bruno Isaković (Croatia)
Denuded for two dancers (U.S. Premiere)
Dance
Friday, September 26, and Saturday, September 27, at 8pm
Abrons Arts Center Experimental
$10 suggested donation / abronsartscenter.org
Created as a solo performance, Denuded bases its movement quality on the relationship between breath and physical tension and the ways in which it permeates the body in each moment. It sets these two organic body functions within the performing moment and uses gradation of their interdependence to radicalize, confront, and re-neutralize them. This creates the physicality that deconstructs and translates meanings out of constant transformations of the body and its need to relax, reactivate, and be conscious. First performed by Bruno Isaković, and then adapted for a female performer, the process revealed the specificity of each body and the whole new range of meanings.Denuded for two dancers will use the same physical practices in a duet form with New York-based dancers Lorene Boubouishian and Kaia Gilje. It will explore the dependence of two bodies—how two bodies understand, cooperate, or are influenced by each other during their own constant transformation. The work will be developed during a residency at Abrons Arts Center in August/September.
Jan Martens (The Netherlands)
Ode to attempt (U.S. Premiere) and
The Dog Days Are Over (U.S. Premiere)
Dance
Part of Dutch Focus
Friday, September 26, 9pm
Abrons Arts Center Playhouse
$10 suggested donation / abronsartscenter.org
Ode to attempt is a humorous deconstruction of the creative process, performed by Jan Martens. The work focuses on the different stages of process and the layers that become invisible in the final stage of a work. Ode to attempt gives these stages that never reached the stage or an audience a second life, positing their imperfect quality as something of equal value to the final product. In this work, Martens thematizes the imperfect, this time not as an adjective (as in imperfect body) but as a state in itself, worth sharing and being seen.
The Dog Days Are Over is inspired by photographer Philippe Halsman’s words: “Ask someone to jump and you’ll see their true face.” After engaging and intrusive solo acts about the beauty of the imperfect body, Jan Martens now creates something completely different, a critical performance about the thin line between art and trickery. The work asks: What is the true face of dance in these uncertain times? What would we like to show, what would we like to see? The Dog Days Are Over shows the dancers giving in to one physical act: the jump―a repetitive and exhausting act that asks…what? The Dog Days Are Over grew from Martens’ work pretty perfect, a coproduction by Dansateliers and Conny Janssen Danst.
Sujata Goel (U.S./India)
Dancing Girl (U.S. Premiere)
Dance
Saturday, September 27, 9pm
Abrons Arts Center Playhouse
$10 suggested donation / abronsartscenter.org
In Dancing Girl, Sujata Goel presents a fictional character version of herself, a mythical doll-like figure who reveals herself and continually morphs―from broken doll to beautiful doll to dancing doll to a lonely doll―finally disappearing completely and returning to a dormant invisible state. To create Dancing Girl, Goel clinically mapped out her physical and psychological behaviors by documenting her qualities, moods, gestures, habits, and movement patterns in order to experience herself as data, as information that could be manipulated and reorganized to take on new meanings. Dancing Girl depicts a performer who seeks to step outside of her body and confront the image of herself.
DUOS featuring Darkmatter (Janani Balasubramanian & Alok Vaid-Menon), Untitled Queen & Merrie Cherry, and Jack Waters & Peter Cramer
Performance
Friday, September 26 and Saturday, September 27, 10pm
Sunday, September 28, 5pm
The Club at La MaMa
$18 / $13 students and seniors / lamama.org
These three evenings will highlight the multicultural, multi-racial diversity of the contemporary, young queer performing arts scene. The final evening will present the dual work of Jack Waters and Peter Cramer, manifesting the history and lineage of queer performance, and the role of both Waters and Cramer as mentors to the current generation of queer performance artists.
The program is co-curated by Nicky Paraiso and Dan Fishback. A co-presentation of La MaMa, the Queer New York International Arts Festival, and The Helix Queer Performance Network.
Friday, September 26, 10pm
Darkmatter (Janani Balasubramanian & Alok Vaid-Menon)
DarkMatter is a trans, South Asian spoken-word duo “hivemind flipping the scantron on your model minority narrative, returning that basic gayze, and spitting anti-colonial futures.” They perform regularly at universities across the country and venues in New York City. Individually, they have done social justice work at local organizations such as the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project and the Audre Lorde Project. Balasubramanian is also a writer atBlack Girl Dangerous (an online forum for QTPOC).
Saturday, September 27, 10pm
Untitled Queen & Merrie Cherry
Untitled Queen is a visual artist, drag queen, and graphic designer who lives and works in Brooklyn. She was born and raised on Governors Island, New York, until its shutdown in 1996. She received her BFA from the Universityof Connecticut and an MFA in visual arts from Parsons The New School for Design. She hosts a drag show/underwear party called Bottoms Up every Wednesday at Sugarland Nightclub in Williamsburg.
Merrie Cherry is one of the few power queens in Brooklyn. Not stopping at being an entertainer she also plans special events such as the Brooklyn Nightlife Awards and hosts at various parties throughout the city. She sleeps during the day and throws glitter in your face at night. She can be found every third Thursday at Metropolitan Bar for DRAGnet. She performs all over Brooklyn and in select parts of Manhattan.
Sunday, September 28, 5pm
Jack Waters & Peter Cramer
Jack Waters & Peter Cramer have a long association with La MaMa from their 1986 One Night Stands cabaret performances to the more recent MIXploritorium 2011, and Visual AIDS’ 25th anniversary exhibit NOT OVER (2013), both at La MaMa Galleria. They are performers, filmmakers, founders of The Greenthumb Garden Le Petit Versailles, and the non-profit arts organization Allied Productions, Inc. They are former co-directors of ABC No Rio (1983–1990). They were artists in residence at the 2013 Emily Harvey Foundation/Venice, and are working on a multi-media musical opus entitled Pestilence that has resulted in a presentation in collaboration with Harvestworks/PASS Studio at the Emily Harvey Gallery New York. Recent publications that include their histories are Sur Rodney (Sur)’s revised chronology for Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces, 1960 – 2010, edited by Lauren Rosati and Mary Anne Staniszewski (MIT Press); and Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Generation by Sarah Schulman (University of California Press).
QNYIA Curator Bio
Zvonimir Dobrović is the founder and program director of the Queer Zagreb festival, which has been taking place in Croatia since 2003. Queer Zagreb has presented more than 150 artists and performing companies from all over the world. In 2009 Dobrović created the Perforations Festival, a network of organizations and producers from the Balkans region with the goal of initiating and promoting regional cooperation, and creating local and international opportunities for young and emerging artists. The new commissions and productions are presented at the annual Perforations Festival that takes place in Zagreb, Rijeka and Dubrovnik, programming more than 20 new works by artists from Central and Eastern Europe. Dobrović co-founded the Queer New York International Arts Festival with the late André von Ah (1987–2013) in 2012.
Venue Information
Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street)
Manhattan
212-598-0400
www.abronsartscenter.org
The Chocolate Factory Theater
5-49 49th Avenue (between Vernon Boulevard and 5th Street)
Long Island City, Queens
718-482-7069
www.chocolatefactorytheater.org
Grace Exhibition Space & Gallery
840 Broadway, 2nd Floor (at 13th Street)
Brooklyn
646-578-3402
www.grace-exhibition-space.com
The Club at La MaMa
74A East 4th Street, 2nd Floor
(between Bowery and Second Avenue)
Manhattan
212-475-7710
www.lamama.org
Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art
26 Wooster Street (between Grand and Canal Streets)
Manhattan
212-431-2609
www.leslielohman.org
