Event Information
Description
Featuring works-in-progress by 2019/2020 Space Grant recipients Catie Leasca, Kayla Farrish, and Ogemdi Ude.
The Space Grant program gives NYC-based dance, theater and performance artists the opportunity to create new work or build upon existing work in a setting that is conducive to working deeply and exploring new territory.
ACCESS ADVISORY: The Main Event by Catie Leasca will 1. utilize scents from air fresheners in performance and 2. include durations of colorful lights flashing in quick succession.
Catie Leasca
The Main Event is an extravaganza featuring party favors, early 2000’s hits and special appearances by the multiplex personalities of the performer. As viewer and performer, we attempt to locate the underlying yearning that vibrates and subtly echoes throughout the most extreme excitement and defeat. Can a true self-absorbed generosity be generated by bringing people together at The Main Event?
Catie Leasca is a dance artist currently based in Brooklyn, NY. With roots in Massachusetts, she has traveled and danced abroad in Israel, France, Belgium, and Germany. Catie has presented her work at Gibney Dance as a Work Up 5.0 artist, Brooklyn Arts Exchange as an Upstart artist, CPR as part of UArts/Chez Bushwick Creative Exchange, Movement Research through Judson Church, Dixon Place and STUDIO4. She has worked professionally with Netta Yerushalmy, Helen Simoneau Danse, Jessie Young, Mary Grace + Artists, and Bryn Cohn + Artists. Catie graduated with her B.F.A. in Dance from the University of the Arts in May, 2017.
Photo by Ian Douglas
Kayla Farrish/Decent Structure Arts
The New Frontier (my dear America) pt. 1 is comprised of expanded works "With grit From, Grace", "Black Bodies Sonata, and some of the film and research process of The New Frontier film. The composite of these works bring visibility and honesty to how American history and societal constructs impact our current identity, experience, and ability for change.
"With grit From, Grace" asks not what the woman might do to change her outcome, and her future the way I've been taught to navigate and accommodate. Instead it wails, it screams, it requires, and demands all that she is owed, and recognizes her composed portrait of experience, power, and feeling. She is the ruthless worthy woman. She is many of us, demanding a better love: respect.
"Black Bodies Sonata" is a duet peering into the humanization and dehumanization of black bodies reflecting what are the layers, trauma, and methods of survival in the black experience. The live performance transferred and elaborated from my recent dance film, "Black Bodies Sonata", looks at black politicized bodies in predominantly white spaces. The juxtapositions of finding our flight, freedom, identity, voice, along with how quickly we are forgotten flesh, images of fear, and formed by society to accommodate to survive. I just wanted to see images and ideas of our experiences, and to question what life do we imagine beyond this?
Kayla Farrish/Decent Structure Arts is an emerging company combining filmmaking, photography, and dance. Farrish is a NY based director with a vision for intimate storytelling. She’s received three choreographic commissions: Of Bones Dance (2014) and Houses on the Moon Theater Company (2016), and Danspace (2019). She co-choreographed Gods and Accepting Darkness with Nik Owens (2015). Studying photography and film with Yara Travesio, Benjamin Heller, and Brooklyn Central, she formed portraiture and improvisation studies Beloved Loveless, and premiered With Delicacy and Permanence live solo and film at B.A.A.D! In Summer 2017, granted the Chez Bushwick residency, she created 5 short films and cinema-inspired photograph gallery. These films screened at Bushwick Open Studios, Triskelion Film Festival, Deconstructed:Dance Films Festival, Mouthfull Presents/Of Bones Dance, and Detroit Women in Film Festival.
In 2018, she developed live works: Wager/With grit From, Grace, live version Black Bodies Sonata, and Why I Can’t Hold Strangers performing at Stuffed: Dinner and Dance and Movement Research at Judson, Pepatian APAP, Arts On Site Performance Party, Danspace Food For Thought, BAAD!, and other spaces. She produced and created “Spectacle” Film and Live Performance evening-length piece apart of Pepatian Dance Your Future Residency (2018). In 2019, she will partake in Keshet Makers Space Experience Residency, Petronio Residency Center, and also premiere new and developing works at Danspace in Fall 2019. She is excited to be a BAX summer space grant recipient to make her new work The New Frontier come to life!!
Photo by Scott Shaw
Ogemdi Ude
In “Nothing like that is ever going to happen to me again (but if it does, at least now I have tools)” Ude examines the holistic embodiment of grief and mourning, addressing how personal and sociocultural narratives are written by excavating memories we are not sure even exist. In it, she asks: How can you find people that aren’t there anymore in all the bits that are?
Ogemdi Ude is a Nigerian-American dance artist, facilitator, and birth doula currently based in Harlem. Her work intertwines movement, soundscapes, and visual art to build black utopias and instigate lived and inherited trauma processing. Her work has been presented at Center for Performance Research, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Streb Lab for Action Mechanics, and the Lewis Center for the Arts. She has served as Community Coordinator for the Public Works initiative at the Public Theater. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BA in English, Dance, and Theater from Princeton University.
