No beginning and no end Boy mother / faceless bloom is a collection of interwoven and embodied stories. Our characters confront, embrace, and seep into, one another: Boy mother, Ame-no Uzume (aka Okame), Amaterasu (The Sun Goddess), and The Shaman. In this way, individual transformation becomes deeply entangled with that of the worlds in which they live, and time and place become materials with which to play. In this way, we never begin and we never end. The mythologies we spin are sometimes of our own creation, sometimes drawn from culture and history, and mostly both. The Japanese story of Amaterasu (The Sun Goddess) and Ame-no Uzume (aka Okame) is the most specific, and their lines intersect and thread throughout. Amaterasu, overwhelmed with fear and heartbreak, shuts herself in a cave leaving the Earth in total darkness. Okame, a clown-like entertainer who revels in her sensuality, devises a scheme to lure Amaterasu out, and enlists the help of a roaring mass of gods. As Amaterasu peeks out at the irresistible joy outside, she sees her own glorious reflection in a bronze mirror cleverly placed at the cave’s entrance by Okame. Light is restored and the gods rejoice. The work also draws from the extraordinary, little-known history of queer-trans Korean shamans active during the periods of Japanese imperial occupation. They possessed a unique fluency in multiple social, political, and cultural spaces, and were able to navigate often opposing communities: the Japanese elite, who engaged them for rituals, celebrations, births, and entertainment; their indigenous Korean communities, who turned to them for similar ceremonial moments, and also for healing, divination, and provocative artistic performances; and the Korean nationalist-modernists, who saw shamanic practice as a threat to the “modernization” of Korea. These queer-trans shamans, or hwarang (Korean: flower boys) as they were sometimes called, were revered, desired, hated, and attacked by these and (and other) communities, and still, they worked, sometimes thrived, and most importantly, lived fully and expansively in their wholeness. Lastly, the work has deep autobiographical roots that bloom in different and – even for us – unexpected ways. The Shaman, whose words build our world, is both a medium and author of these histories. And at times,
she thins the veil just enough to reveal herself as well. Through ritual and performance, we create a kind of cumulative ancestral lineage that can contain all of us – one that is made true by our loving commitment to one another, that bypasses blood in favor of trust, that connects to a continuum of diasporic & queer lives, and that extends in all directions without beginning or end. Our work together is primarily this work – something we hope never ends – and this piece is its current expression. Our deep thanks for your generosity, trust, and energy. We are so grateful to have this opportunity to be with you.
Cover photo by Bruce Clayton Tom
Juni One Set Boy mother / faceless bloom NOV 16-18, 2023
Co-presented by Dia Art Foundation and New York Live Arts as part of Performa Biennial 2023 “Our work is intensely collaborative, rooted in the deepest respect and love we hold for one another. Through an intentional, transformational process, we build a world within which we can be free. Our bodies live with fear, in the shadows of beginning-less violence, in joy and in care. Through ritual and embodiment, we find openings for healing and growth and invite others to arrive. We are trying to tell a story we never want to end.”
Created, Directed, and Performed by Juni One Set: Senga Nengudi: co-creator, sculptural & costume design, movement, reader yuniya edi kwon: co-creator, music, movement Haruko Crow Nishimura: co-creator, movement, music Joshua Kohl: co-creator, live musician, sound design, stage design Degenerate Art Ensemble Artists and Production Team Projection Designer, Cinematographer, Editor: Leo Mayberry Lighting Designer: Jessica Trundy Costume assistant: Willow Fox Production Manager: Maximilian Sarkowsky DAE Assistant / Road Manager: Ashley Hickey Creative Support Associate Costume Designers: Hisham Dawoud and Willow Fox Costume Support: Jasmine Dillavou and Evelyn Bittner Sound Contributions: Tomeka Reid and Jean Cook
Run Time: 90 minutes Nov 17 Stay Late Conversation moderated by Matilde Guidelli Guidi, curator & curatorial department co-head at Dia sengasenga.com / eddykwon.net / degenerateartensemble.com
FUNDING Boy mother / faceless bloom is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Colorado College in partnership with Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, and NPN. The Creation & Development Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information, visit www.npnweb.org. This project is supported by the National Performance Network (NPN) Documentation & Storytelling Initiative. For more information: www. npnweb.org. Boy mother / faceless bloom was made with financial and residency support from BASE Experimental Arts (Seattle) and Roulette Intermedium (Brooklyn).
Enjoy this presentation and your experience at Live Arts? Please consider making a donation so we can continue to support artists like this and their critical work! Donate at newyorklivearts.org/support/donate We acknowledge and pay respect to Lenape people, elders, and ancestors past, present, and coming in the future. We acknowledge Indigenous people who may be present right now. We acknowledge and offer deep gratitude to Lenapehoking where we are now - the land, and waters of the Lenape homeland.
BILL CHATS with Marc Bamuthi Joseph DEC 4, 7PM
Photo by Maria Baranova
Photo by Bethanie Hines
The singular Bill Chats program features Jones in conversation with poet Marc Bamuthi Joseph. This season’s first in the series of intimate chats between Jones and theater makers, authors, scholars, and more, will pay witness to these two artists’ deep working relationship and creative dialogue behind their co-conceived opera Watch Night opening the Perelman Performing Arts Center’s (PAC NYC) inaugural season, November 3-18. Directed and Choreographed by Jones, Libretto by Bamuthi Joseph, and Composed by Tamar-kali, this PAC NYC commission is an immersive exploration of justice and forgiveness in the face of deadly rage. We thank our Partners for New Performance for supporting Bill Chats: Alexes Hazen, Linda Hirschson, Julie Orlando, Andrea Rosen, Nina Stricker, and Robyn Trani.
TICKETS & INFO: newyorklivearts.org
BIOGRAPHIES
Senga Nengudi is interested in the visual arts, dance, body mechanics and matters of the spirit from an early age these elements still play themselves out in ever changing ways in her art. She has always used a variety of natural (sand, dirt, rocks, seed pods) and unconventional (panty hose, found objects, masking tape) materials to fashion her works, utilizing these materials as a jazz musician utilizes notes and sounds to improvise a composition. The thrust of her art is to share common experiences in abstractions that hit the senses and center, often welcoming the viewer to become a participant. She also teaches at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs in the Visual Arts and Performing Arts Department, and has always been involved with bringing arts programs emphasizing diversity to the communities in which she resides. yuniya edi kwon (b. 1989 – also known as eddy kwon) is a violinist, vocalist, poet, and interdisciplinary performance artist based in Lenapehoking, or New York City. Her practice connects composition, improvisation, movement, and ceremony to explore transformation & transgression, ritual practice as a tool to queer space & lineage,
and the use of mythology to connect, obscure, and reveal. As a composer-performer and improviser, she is inspired by Korean folk timbres & inflections, textures & movement from natural environments, and American experimentalism as shaped by the AACM. Her work as a choreographer and movement artist embodies an expressive release and reclamation of colonialism’s spiritual imprints, connecting to both Japanese Butoh and a lineage of queer trans practitioners of Korean shamanic ritual. In addition to an evolving, interdisciplinary solo practice, she performs and collaborates with artists of diverse disciplines, including The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Du Yun, Tomeka Reid, Holland Andrews, International Contemporary Ensemble, Kenneth Tam, Isabel Crespo Pardo, and Moor Mother. She has performed alongside Roscoe Mitchell, Mary Halvorson, Nicole Mitchell, Cory Smythe, Henry Threadgill, Susan Alcorn, Carla Kihlstedt, Jessika Kenney, Lesley Mok, Satomi Matsuzaki, and others. In 2023, she founded SUN HAN GUILD, a sound and performance collective with composer-improvisers Laura Cocks, Jessie Cox, DoYeon Kim, and Lester St. Louis. She is a recipient of the Foundation
for Contemporary Arts Robert Rauschenberg Award in Music/ Sound, Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Music Composition, an Arts Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, a Johnson Fellow at Americans for the Arts, and a United States Artists Ford Fellow. eddykwon.net Haruko Crow Nishimura is a dancer, vocalist and artistic director of Degenerate Art Ensemble (DAE). She is always searching to discover how art can create deeper connections and awakenings. Her unique style of movement is inspired by her practices of physical theater and butoh dance. She excavates the dark corners of humanity, inventing new mythologies and reimagining fairy tales, telling stories that strive to reveal hidden beauty, confront demons, and ultimately find healing. She is a recipient of Arts Innovators Award from Artist Trust, a Creative Capital award, is a Guggenheim fellow, received a commission with her group DAE from director Robert Wilson to re-interpret his work Einstein on the Beach (NY), created a solo dance for legendary dancer Anna Halprin’s 95 Rituals (SF), and a large scale site specific collaboration with Olson Kundig Architects (Seattle). She has performed her dance work throughout North America
and Europe. Her newest work Skeleton Flower premiered at the Spotlight USA dance festival in Bulgaria presented by American Dance Abroad, appeared in the 2021 International Festival of Contemporary Dance in Mexico City and the HCA Festival in Denmark in 2022. Skeleton Flower will be shown in San Francisco in 2024. Joshua Kohl is a composer, musician and sound designer and co-directs Degenerate Art Ensemble. His approach to music is dedicated to the exploration and proliferation of genre-free music that utilizes all of the available tools of music-making, from classical instruments to electronics and new inventions with a goal of reaching the hearts and souls of the listener through vibrational resonance. He was the recipient of Creative Capital, Artist Trust Innovators Award, MAP Fund, NEA and Music Theatre Now awards. His work for string quartet and choir was performed by the Kronos Quartet at their 40th anniversary concert in Seattle and at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. In addition to his work with Degenerate Art Ensemble he is also a passionate conductor of the music of his peers including a Lincoln center concert of the work of composer Jherek Bischoff with singer David Byrne. He is
deeply honored to work with this exceptional team of collaborators. Seattle based Degenerate Art Ensemble, led by Nishimura and Kohl, makes performances inspired by punk, comics, cinema, nightmares and fairytales driven by live music and their own style of physical theater and butoh inspired dance. They combine projected imagery with the movement and sound to create new mythologies, revealing other dimensions, challenging reality in a multi-dimensional storytelling experience. Degenerate Art Ensemble has shown their work throughout North America and Europe known for their large scale dance and theater projects, concerts and site-transforming experiences. In this unique collaboration, Degenerate Art Ensemble’s artists, designers and technicians join the Juni One Set collaboration for the creation of Boy mother / faceless bloom. More at degenerateartensemble.com About Dia Art Foundation Taking its name from the Greek word meaning “through,” Dia was established in 1974 with the mission to serve as a conduit for artists to realize ambitious new projects, unmediated by overt interpretation and uncurbed by the limitations of more traditional museums and galleries. Dia’s programming fosters contemplative and sustained
consideration of a single artist’s body of work and its collection is distinguished by the deep and longstanding relationships that the nonprofit has cultivated with artists whose work came to prominence particularly in the 1960s and ’70s. About Performa Founded in 2004 by art historian and curator RoseLee Goldberg, Performa has expanded the possibilities for visual artists working in performance, providing essential curatorial and production support, and, with its dedicated biennial, providing a worldwide platform for performance of the 21st century. Performa Commissions have entirely changed the possibilities of the form and its educational programs have shown its rich history as an integral part of artistic practice, reaching back through the centuries to the Renaissance. This visionary organization has entirely transformed every art institution’s approach to visual art performance, now a staple in art museums and galleries throughout the world. Since 2005, Performa has produced nine biennials, reaching an international audience of over 250,000 people and featuring more than 1,000 artists at 300-plus venues and locations across New York City.
LIVE ARTS CONTRIBUTORS New York Live Arts is deeply grateful to all the individuals listed below for their vital gifts to New York Live Arts over the last year: $500,000 and higher Slobodan Randjelović & Jon Stryker $100,000-$499,999 Anonymous Eleanor Friedman Ruth & Stephen Hendel Alex Katz Foundation $50,000 - $99,999 Barbara & Alan Marks Jane Bovingdon Semel & Terry Semel | Semel Charitable Foundation Suzanne Karpas Helen Haje Matthew Putman Colleen Keegan in memory of Linda Grass Shapiro $25,000 - $49,999 David Dechman & Michel Mercure Zoe Eskin Adam Flatto Andrea Rosen Amy Newman & Bud Shulman Bloomberg Philanthropies Dance/NYC Ylva Cavalli-Björkman & Willard Ahdritz Jennifer & Jonathan Soros Lorraine Gallard & Richard H. Levy William Floyd Diana Wege / Wege Foundation $10,000 - $24,999 Ellen M. Poss Pat Stryker Claire Danes & Hugh Dancy Anonymous Patricia Blanchet/ Ed Bradley Family Foundation Agnes Gund Jody and John Arnhold Michael Malafronte and Julia Haley Alexes Hazen Nina & Gabriel Stricker $5,000 - $9,999 Patricia Blanchet | Ed Bradley Family Paula Cooper & Jack Macrae Barbara and Henry Pillsbury Cindy Sherman
Jeffrey B. & Wendy Liszt Jeannie Colbert Randy Polumbo Robert Longo JP Versace Jason Keehm Catharine Stimpson Ellen Pechman Derrick Adams Thomas Rom Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, Inc. Jeffrey Schneider Rose C. Cali Herb Ritts, Jr. Foundation $1,000 - $4,999 The Angelson Family Foundation Tom Hennes Deborah Hellman & Derek Brown Kimberly Drew Erin Rossitto Joan Davidson Bill T. Jones & Bjorn Amelan Robyn Trani Helen Mills & Gary Tannenbaum Melissa Schiff Soros Bella Meyer Darnell L. Moore Mimi Garrard Gerald Appelstein Michael & Deborah Goldberg Kathleen Chalfant Thomas & Barbara Gottschalk Alida Latham Anna Wheeler Terence Dougherty & Pierre Duleyrie Alessandra Nicifero Brinton and Buck Parson Mickalene Thomas Jenny Holzer Andrew Keegan Nancy Meyer & Marc Weiss Susan Micari Kevin Harter Martha Sherman Eric Oberstein Meridee Moore & Kevin King Mark O’Donnell Dee Dee Sides Hedy Klineman
Gavin Kenny Jon and Wendy Smith James A. Turrell and Kyung-Lim Lee Turrell Beth Rudin DeWoody Jordan and Laura Rogove The Susan Stein Shiva Foundation Megumi & Bruce Williams Andrew Halliday $500 - $999 Arthur Aviles Leila Shakkour The Marshall Frankel Foundation Antoine Drye Otho Kerr Naima Green John Sansone Saami Bloom Leslie E. Stevens Aimee Meredith Cox Carol Bryce-Buchanan Carol Yorke and Gerard Conn
Cynthia Pearlman Wade Turnbull Deborah Swiderski Ellynne Skove John Sansone Jordan Baker-Kilner Erika Ehrman Fabian Bernal Linda Murray Emma Taylor Gifts and commitments between 7/1/2022-6/30/2023
Support for New York Live Arts is provided by the Arnhold Foundation, Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Ed Bradley Family Foundation, The Brant Foundation, Inc., Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, Dance/ NYC, Ford Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, Harkness Foundation for Dance, Marta Heflin Foundation, Alex Katz Foundation, Lambent Foundation, Alice Lawrence Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mellon Foundation, National Performance Network, New England Foundation for the Arts, NYC COVID-19 Response & Impact Fund in the New York Community Trust, One World Fund, The Poss Family Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Jerome Robbins Foundation, The Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, San Francisco Foundation The Semel Charitable Foundation, Scherman Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, Tides Foundation Corporate support for New York Live Arts includes Con Edison, Google, Tito’s Handmade Vodka. Public support for New York Live Arts is from Humanities New York, National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Correction, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the New York State Council on the Arts.
STAFF & BOARD Artistic Leadership
Executive Leadership
Board of Directors
Bill T. Jones Artistic Director
Kim Cullen Executive Director & CEO
Stephen Hendel Co-Chair
Janet Wong Associate Artistic Director
Ali Burke Chief of Staff
Richard H. Levy Co-Chair
Programming, Producing & Engagement
Development
Helen Haje Vice Chair
Dave Archuletta Chief Development Officer
Slobodan RandjeloviĆ Vice Chair
John Jahnke Institutional Giving Manager
Alan Marks Treasurer
Kyle Maude Producing Director Hannah Emerson Jernigan Producer Jessica Prince Producing Associate
Nina Phuong Ha Development Manager
Bill T. Jones Artistic Director Ex-Officio Kim Cullen Chief Executive Officer Ex-Officio
Production
Julie Davis Special Events & Donor Engagement Manager
Chanel Pinnock Production Manager
Felix Reyes Institutional Giving Associate
Leo Janks Lighting Manager
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James Bennett Audio/Video Manager
Nupur Dey Chief Financial Officer
Colleen Keegan
Megan Dechaine Production Stage Manager
Manathus Dey Finance Associate
Amy Newman
Tricia Navigato Assistant Production Manager
Operations
Ellen M. Poss
Creative Director
Gregory English Operations Manager
Matthew Putman
Bjorn G. Amelan
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