Made specifically for the Chocolate Factory Theater’s new space, Folds revels in four dancers’ vulnerable, molting, and triumphant bodies; their operatic and primal voices; and the real-time morphing and mending of a large visual art installation made in collaboration with Ukrainian visual artist Inna Babaeva.
Events
“‘When they say, Come here and play and experiment and move the furniture around and don’t worry about making a mess, it really creates an atmosphere that is conducive to discovery and surprise’. As the theater settles into its new home — two adjacent warehouses that were once a tool and die factory — that ethos will likely endure, along with the founders’ cultivation of local relationships.” – Siobhan Burke, New York Times
“‘When they say, Come here and play and experiment and move the furniture around and don’t worry about making a mess, it really creates an atmosphere that is conducive to discovery and surprise’. As the theater settles into its new home — two adjacent warehouses that were once a tool and die factory — that ethos will likely endure, along with the founders’ cultivation of local relationships.” – Siobhan Burke, New York Times
Current Season
“I know this story. It’s a story I’ve loved again and again. All I know is my body moving through time. Reminding myself that I have blood pumping through me, and that has to be enough. I walk and walk to keep from standing still. I think of my pelvis sloshing around in a tangle of muscle and tendon. So tight and bound, perhaps a sprinkle of arthritis. But if I keep walking I feel that I can. And if I can, then at least I will keep moving.”
Aaron Landsman’s new performance is staged environmentally throughout The Chocolate Factory Theater’s stark industrial space, juxtaposing spoken text with choreography, live music and projections.
Choreomaniacs, for five dancers, explores the phenomena of choreomania or “dancing plague” in which people danced themselves to death during the Middle Ages. An accompanying duet, Revolver, speaks to existential threat from super-catastrophes. Both deploy Westwater’s choreographic approach - the disorganized body - in which postmodern dance forms are destabilized. A subtext that dance itself causes pain binds these two works together.
Family Happiness is a new performance work about Jewish agression, unprocessed Jewish grief from the Holocaust, and current ramifications of those dynamics in Israel/Palestine. This piece continues May’s decade-long investigation into bodily control and the complicated system of victimhood and perpetration; prioritizing a space for culpability and catharsis.
Remember the future? Nova Express is the final edition of DECODER, a sound and image cutup machine, that has been turning out concerts, digital transmissions, video art, and sound recordings for the last 8 years. This Machine is for everyone - according to William Burroughs whose instructions were followed closely to create it.
“I came here to weep” is a multimodal project that investigates colonial power, self-determination and complex relations of citizenship. It is made up of a series of events that interweave, thicken and inform one another, inviting the public to create their own engagement inside the work through multiple forms of witnessing, participating and activating the work.
The centralization of collaboration between Raymond Pinto and Angie Pittman will beckon the destabilizing of hierarchies in their individual creative practices. With this intention in place, they call upon a collective imagination that will augment the aesthetic frames of blackness and queerness.
