nia love UNDERcurrents A Work-in-Progress Showing & Reception
Thursday, November 3, 2022, 6PM Chelsea Factory 547 W 26th Street, New York, NY 10001 Harlem Stage: 150 Convent Avenue at West 135 Street, New York, NY 10031 Phone: 212.281.9240 ext. 19 | Website: www.harlemstage.org
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ABOUT THE EVENT Tonight, dancer, choreographer, and Harlem Stage WaterWorks Established Artist, nia love, and her company present a work-inprogress showing of UNDERcurrents, inviting audiences to probe the seam between catastrophic history and quotidian memory and tend the textures of generational care. Of the performance and her larger body of inquiry nia love says, “The center of gravity in my work is the question of blackness and the complexity held within the experiences it names: resistance, virtuosity, breaking, hypermobility, inordinate constraint. I aim to destabilize and dismantle ‘dance,’ redressing it as gesture—the memory of movement and geographies held in the body. My work gets made under the viewer’s gaze: interfaces between the audience, my flesh, and the object-sonic environment, produces experimental flows of real-time visceral response and improvisatory action. I craft for the stage and beyond: galleries, gardens, farms, and most recently, the ocean floor.” Special thanks to Chelsea Factory for generously hosting nia love’s UNDERcurrents technical residency, and to First Republic for hosting this evening’s reception. Thank you for joining us! Harlem Stage
PERSONNEL
Choreographer/Director nia love Performers J Buoey, Marco Farroni, Cyan Hunter, nia love, Makeda Lily Love-Roney, Jesse Phillips-Fein, Diana Uribe, Jessica Autumn Ziegler Video Rhonda Haynes, Aidan Un Composer Antoine Roney Musicians Antoine Roney, Aerophone Emanuel Ruffler, Keyboards Technical/Set/ Anthony Fernandez Production Design Stage Manager David Sierra Land Acknowledgement Dr. Lela Aisha Jones Lighting Designer Amanda K. Ringger
ARTIST STATEMENT
UNDERcurrents is both a continuation and a fresh departure within nia love’s long-term project, g1(host):lostatsea. A serial, multi-media performance and research platform, g1(host):lostatsea marks the continuous engagement with the memory and “afterlives” of transatlantic slavery. It pivots on this query: what remains of the Middle Passage as force, gesture, and affect? Taking off from these initiatives, these questions are explored through two primary thematic elements: water and doors. The point of departure for captive Africans into the Middle Passage is described as “the door of no return.” Conjuring the continual resonance of this world-making and breaking threshold, UNDERcurrents is an immersive and participatory audience experience with an installation that is activated by performance. Our aim here is an experience of immersion that is, most crucially, felt; where the audience participates in a speculative process in which the submerged gestural and elemental traces of transatlantic slavery are made palpable. This is the core of the new departure of UNDERcurrents: we want to bring the audience fully into this world, we want to reduce the distance between the audience and the performance, taking the audience out to sea, or bringing the sea forth, and from this altered perspective we shift our embodied habits of sensing these foundational conditions of our lived environments and histories.
Tonight’s reception is generously supported by First Republic. Commissioned by Harlem Stage through its WaterWorks Established Artists Program and supported, in part, by the Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation, Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Thompson Family Foundation, and the Leonard & Robert Weintraub Family Fund.
BIOGRAPHIES NIA LOVE
CHOREOGRAPHER, DANCER nia love is a choreographer and somatic practitioner driven by the social force and weight of blackness. Aiming to breach the propriety of “dance,” she redresses it as gesture - the memory of movement, geographies, and scales and ruptures of time held in our flesh. Graduate of Howard University (BA) and Florida State University (MFA), she is a Fulbright Fellow, Urban Bush Women Choreographic Initiative 2.0 Fellow, and an Embodying Anti-Racism Fellow at Wesleyan University. She has received two Bessie’s awards for performance and music composition, and is a recipient of the MAP Fund, the Herb Alpert Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award, LMCC Workspace Residency, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) Residency, the Movement Research Rosin Fund Residency. and NEFA’s National Dance Project Production Grant. Love currently is an adjunct professor at Queens College and the New School, and the artistic advisor to NYLA’s Fresh Tracks program, and BAX’s Artist-in-Residence program.
WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!
nia love welcomes your feedback on tonight’s showing. Please e-mail: undercurrentsdance@gmail.com
PHOTO GALLERY
J BUOEY
MARCO FARRONI
CYAN HUNTER
MAKEDA LILY LOVE-RONEY
JESSE PHILLIPS-FEIN
JESSICA AUTUMN ZIEGLER
DIANA URIBE
OUR SUPPORTERS
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council. Harlem Stage’s Programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
ABOUT HARLEM STAGE Harlem Stage is the performing arts center that bridges Harlem’s cultural legacy to contemporary artists of color and dares to provide the artistic freedom that gives birth to new ideas. For nearly 40 years our singular mission has been to perpetuate and celebrate the unique and diverse artistic legacy of Harlem and the indelible impression it has made on American culture. We provide opportunity, commissioning, and support for artists of color, make performances easily accessible to all audiences, and introduce children to the rich diversity, excitement, and inspiration of the performing arts. We fulfill our mission through commissioning, incubating, and presenting innovative and vital work that responds to the historical and contemporary conditions that shape our lives and the communities we serve.
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