jess pretty
call and response

June 26-29, 2024
Wednesday through Saturday at 7pm

$10-$275

  • image from jess pretty's "call and response". photo by Rachel Keane. jess sits on a bench in the foreground, dimly lit. she holds a microphone toward an audience member who shares the bench with her. In the background, white brick walls, a lamp, sofa, coffee table, rug on a blond wood dance floor.
  • Image from jess pretty's "call and response". Photo by Rachel Keane. jess pretty, her back to us, wears a white top and white pants. She stands at the large steel roll gate, the entrance to The Chocolate Factory Theater. The roll gate has been opened to the street. jess's hands rest on the gate. In the background, parked cars, buildings, skyline.

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

View the show program.

In call and response, jess pretty wraps her audience in a conceptual, and literal, embrace. Unfolding as a dance-based, experiential conversation – between pretty and her younger selves, her ancestors, and everybody else in the room – call and response is a kind of casual, yet devotional, soirèe or salon or kickback, with pretty as the host.

Within an environment of familiar (and familial) comforts – living room furniture, record player, books and plants; all of it bathed in continuous, deep blue light – call and response doles out laughter and music as soft (and generous) launching points for an experience of memory and reflection that is shared and felt as much as it is witnessed. It endeavors to slow down the room; and invites us to join in the attempt.

Choreographer / Performer: jess pretty. Creative Interlocutors: keyon gaskin & Niall Jones. Lighting Design / Tech Support / Set Design: Maggie Heath. DJ / Sound Practitioner: Tyler Hughley / DJ Luccihugh. Sound Consultant: Jeremy Touissaint-Baptiste.