Abigail Levine
Redactions

June 8-11, 2022
Wednesday through Saturday at 8pm

All performances of Redactions are sold out. An in-person waitlist opens at 7:15pm each night, first come first served.

Performances will take place at The Chocolate Factory Theater, 38-33 24th Street, Long Island City.

$20 General Admission ticket to the performance. $35 includes General Admission ticket + a copy of the limited edition Redactions publication.

View the show program.

Redactions is an ambivalent autobiography, a chorus of psyches, a year-long look out the window. It has holes for other voices. Redactions wants to listen to the music of the world but keeps getting interrupted by sirens.

Layered on a gestural movement language — sculptural, psychological, and intimate — are bits of narrative about sex in an airplane bathroom, Fred Moten’s take on abstraction, live-streamed uprisings and insurrections, hand washing, and the evening stars converging in winter.

The movement and text are contained in an architecture of object-based actions—pushing bricks, gathering bottles, upturning chairs—set into the particulars of the Chocolate Factory’s new performance space. Like a house of cards that is dismantled and rebuilt again and again, these actions reveal the work’s seams, the dancers’ actual labor in creating its images and metaphors.

Redactions began as a series of text drawings that follow rules for their creation, akin to constraints Levine uses while choreographing dances. Alongside the Redactions, she created the Utterances, phrases of language-like movement. They are brought together as spoken text and movement in performance.

Created by Abigail Levine. Performed by Martita Abril, Anna Azrieli, Julian Barnett, Abigail Levine, and Kristopher K.Q. Pourzal. Music by Paula Matthusen. Lighting by Madeline Best. Costumes / Design by Magdalena Jarkowiec.

A print portfolio of the Redactions accompanies the performance, published by Fridman Gallery with context essay by Claudia La Rocco.

Redactions has been supported by residencies at MacDowell, Fondazione Bogliasco, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Florida State University School of Fine Arts/ FAR Space, Human Resources LA, an emergency grant from Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and developed in partnership with Los Angeles Performance Practice. Redactions have been published in Imagined Theatres and La Vague Journal.

“Abigail Levine turns life into performance through a subtle catalogue of utterances, inscriptions, and gestures.” – Theo Armstrong, The Brooklyn Rail