Please join us at Ethan Cohen KuBe, Kunsthalle Beacon, on May 18th, 2019, for a collaborative performance celebrating movement and sound. As part of their inaugural season, A-Y/dancers licensed a unique “MinEvent” from the Merce Cunningham Trust. The performance is an arrangement of excerpts from works that Cunningham choreographed in the span of 3 decades, from the 1960s to the 1990s, strung together by Jean Freebury, a former member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. It is being performed with permission by the Merce Cunningham Trust in honor of the Merce Cunningham Centennial, which has involved dance companies across the country and the globe to revive and reinvigorate the legendary choreographer’s work as we celebrate what would be his 100th year.

 

For their performance at the KuBe, a unique score will be composed and performed by sound artist Mark Trecka. His piece will consist of audio recordings of the dancers’ bodies during rehearsals, transferred to cassette, cut into loops, and amplified back into the room in real time. In a similar conceptual approach, artist Joseph Ayers creates a unique animation that samples the dancers' movements recorded during rehearsals, and then projects the resulting abstraction as a backdrop to the performance. Together the sound piece and the video projection become both an accompaniment, and an agitation to the chance choreography of the dancers; an invitation to synchronicity, but also to the possibility of somatic dissonance.

 

A-Y/dancers is a repertory dance company based in New York’s Hudson Valley led by Sienna Blaw, Claire Deane and Erin Landers. The company creates dance programs that span the history of concert dance and provide audiences with experiences of classical modern dance, acclaimed contemporary dance, and groundbreaking emerging choreography. For this MinEvent the group is excited to include Jacquelline Calle as a guest dancer.

 

Mark Trecka is a Chicago-born writer, sound artist, and performer. His work explores connections between text and sound, memory and nature and identity. His writing has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, among others, and he founded Pillars and Tongues in 2007 and has recorded and toured with Dark Dark Dark since 2010. Everything Falling Crosses Over is his first full-length solo work.

 

Joseph Ayers is an artist, curator, and educator living in Beacon, NY. In his work, Ayers uses a combination of traditional media and new technology to explore both connections and disparity between cultural and psychological perceptions. The subjects in his work vary from personal to political, often creating abstract narratives between diverse and disparate elements.

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