This dance starts by looking inward into the body and its internal structures – the nerves, the organs, the fluids, the bones – and uses those structures as a framework for creating the multi-layered components of performance. This dance is concerned with sentience – the sentience of body: the body of the performers, the body of the audience, the body of the space and the body of the thing we call “performance”, as if it was all one big collection of nerves and guts and thoughts and feelings.

The Craft of the Father is about how I negotiate this thing called dance, and the ways in which it challenges language, control, balance and certainty. It’s about the desperation and near impossibility of making dances in New York City. It’s about wanting and needing more, and not always knowing how. It’s about the unruliness of sensory experience, in all its destructive and transformative power, and how that experience underpins the ways in which we move about the world. It is pre and post language, and it wants your children to understand.

Created by Levi Gonzalez. Performers: Levi Gonzalez, Kayvon Pourazar, and Eleanor Smith. Music/Sound: Tatyana Tenenbaum. Dramaturgy: Susan Mar Landau. Ligthing Design: Natalie Robin.

“Posing and Rubbing and Rolling and You Name It”  – Brian Seibert, New York Times

“Levi Gonzalez opens The Craft of The Father at The Chocolate Factory”  – Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Infinite Body