DANCE New York Performed Manifestos

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600 Highwaymen is the moniker for theatre artists Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone. Six original works since 2009, with presentations in New York in Under The Radar (The Public Theater), Crossing the Line (French Institute Alliance Française), River to River (Lower Manhattan Cultural Council), Abrons Arts Center, The Invisible Dog, University Settlement; Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH), International Festival of Arts & Ideas (New Haven, CT), FringeArts (Philadelphia, PA), On The Boards (Seattle, WA), Mount Tremper Arts (Mount Tremper, NY), Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center (College Park, MD), Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX); and in Europe, at Centre Pompidou and Parc de la Villette (France), Festival Theaterformen (Germany), Noorderzon Festival (The Netherlands), Zürcher Theater Spektakel (Switzerland). Upcoming presentations include OzAsia Festival (Australia), Onassis Cultural Centre (Greece), In Between Time International Festival (UK). 600 HWM received an Obie Award in 2014, Zurich’s ZKB Patronage Prize in 2015, and a Bessie Nomination for Outstanding Production of 2015. The company receives support from The Jerome Foundation, New England Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Puffin Foundation, and numerous individual supporters. Their newest work The Fever will premiere in 2017.

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Luciana Achugar is a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay who grew as an artist in close dialogue with the NY and Uruguayan contemporary dance communities. She began making work collaboratively with Levi Gonzalez in 1999, and she has been making dance in NYC and Uruguay independently since 2002. Her work is concerned with the post-colonial world, searching for an undoing of current power structures from the inside out. She is a two-time “Bessie” Award recipient, a Guggenheim Fellow, Creative Capital Grantee and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grantee, amongst other accolades. She was one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2012 and her Bessie Award winning work PURO DESEO was named one of 2010 TimeOUT NY’s “Best of Dance.” Her ongoing project The Pleasure Project (2014), a public space intervention, has been seen in NYC as guerrilla performance and through LMCC’s Paths to Pier 42 Program, at Le Mouvement-Performing the City Festival in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland and at the American Realness Festival in NYC. She received the 2015 Austin Critic’s Award for Best Touring work for OTRO TEATRO which had been presented there at the Fusebox Festival, and had premiered in 2014 at the Walker Art Center and NYLA. Her latest work, An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love, premiered at Gibney Dance in December 2015, was remounted with an all Uruguayan cast at the Festival Internacional de Danza en Uruguay this month; and it will be presented outside as a performance/block party/urban ritual at the River to River Festival in Lower Manhattan this June.

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Faye Driscoll is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer and director who has been hailed as a “startlingly original talent” by the New York Times. Her work has been commissioned by Danspace Project, LMCC, ICA/Boston, The Kitchen, Walker Arts Center, Dance Theater Workshop, Wexner Center for the Arts, and American Dance Festival and has been presented internationally at Theatre de Vanves, Festival d’Automne a Paris, and the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb. She has been awarded a Doris Duke Artist Award, The MAP Fund Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital award, and a Foundation for Contemporary Art Individual Artist Award. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of Art and Design, Mass Live Arts, The Performing Garage Presents, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Park Avenue Armory, and was a choreographic fellow at MANCC. She is currently working on the second iteration of her THANK YOU FOR COMING series, TYFC: Play which will premiere at the Wexner Center for the Arts in September 2016.

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Raja Feather Kelly Recipient of the 2016 Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography, Raja Feather Kelly is the first and only choreographer to dedicate the entirety of his company’s work to Andy Warhol through -The WARHOL Series- a collection of dance-theatre performances. For over a decade, Kelly has worked throughout the United States and abroad in search of the connections between popular culture and humanity and their integration into experiential dance-theatre. Kelly currently choreographs, writes, and directs his own work as Artistic Director of the feath3r theory, a culture-driven dance-theatre company. As a dancer, Kelly can be seen in the work of Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group, Keely Garfield, and Christopher Williams.

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Andrea Kleine is a writer, choreographer, and performance artist. She is a five-time MacDowell Colony fellow and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow. Her debut novel, CALF, was named one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Fiction Books of 2015. She writes about dance and performance for PAJ: a journal of performance and art, and on her blog, The Dancers Will Win. Her recent performance work, Screening Room, or, The Return of Andrea Kleine (as revealed through a re-enactment of a 1977 television program about a "long and baffling" film by Yvonne Rainer), was commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater in 2014. Her next performance project, My Dinner with Andrea: the piece formerly known as Torture Playlist, will premiere at New York Live Arts in February 2017.

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Paloma McGregor is a Caribbean‐born choreographer, writer, and organizer living in Harlem. An eclectic artist, she has structured improvisation for a floating platform in the Bronx River, choreographed an Afro‐futurist pop opera at The Kitchen and devised a multidisciplinary performance work about food justice with three dozen community members and students at UC Berkeley. Since 2011, Paloma has been developing Building a Better Fishtrap, an iterative performance project rooted in her 90‐year‐old father’s vanishing fishing tradition. The work examines what we take with us, leave behind and return to reclaim. Paloma was a 2013‐14 Artist In Residence at NYU’s Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics and is currently an Artist In Residence at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange. She is director of Angela’s Pulse and founder of Dancing While Black. She also facilitates technique, creative process, and community engagement workshops around the world. She toured internationally for six years with Urban Bush Women, and continues to perform in project‐based work with choreographers including Liz Lerman, Jill Sigman, Cassie Meador, and Marjani Forte.

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Katy Pyle is a multimedia performance artist whose works explore fantasy, transformation, queer failure, and the lineage of performance. Pyle began studying ballet as a child, and always jumped with the boys at the end of class. She became a company apprentice with Austin Contemporary Ballet at 14 and furthered her studies at North Carolina School of the Arts. At 16, she diverged from ballet because of its limited possibilities for gender representation, and woefully narrow ideas about bodies. She went on to study modern dance and choreography at NCSA, and then post-modern dance and Multimedia Performance Art at Hollins. Since moving to New York in 2002, her work has been presented at Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Brooklyn Museum, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, Galapagos, PS122, La Mama, Dance Theater Workshop, Movement Research at the Judson Church (and MR Festivals), and the Bushwick Starr. Pyle founded the Ballez in 2011, and has been ardently pursuing its mission ever since. She teaches the celebrated “Adult Ballez” class weekly through Brooklyn Arts Exchange (most often with Jules Skloot), and has brought the class to Movement Research, the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, CounterPULSE in San Francisco, University Musical Society in Ann Arbor, Irreverent Dance in London, Parsons, the Beyond Tolerance Youth Conference, Yale University, New York University, and Sarah Lawrence. As a performer/creator, she has worked with Ivy Baldwin, Faye Driscoll, John Jasperse, Karinne Keithley Syers, Xavier Le Roy, Jennifer Monson, Anna Sperber, Katie Workum, and is currently touring the Untitled Feminist Show, which she co-created with Young Jean Lee Theater Company. Evening length works include “Salute to Ex-Best Friends,”asubtout (Pyle & Eleanor Hullihan), Galapagos, 2005; “The Lady Centaur Show,” asubtout, PS 122, 2007; “THE WAY: You Make Me Feel,” Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, 2010; “COVERS,” The Bushwick Starr, 2012; “The Firebird, a Ballez,” Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, 2013; “Variations on Virtuosity, a Gala with the Stars of the Ballez,” American Realness at Abrons Arts Center, 2015; “Sleeping Beauty & the Beast,” La MaMa Moves! at La MaMa ETC, 2016. She has received creative support from Brooklyn Arts Council, Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), Dragon’s Egg, the Jerome Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Mertz Gilmore, Mount Tremper Arts, Rockbridge Artist’s Exchange, and over 1000 individual supporters.

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Kate Watson-Wallace is a choreographer, director, and visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She creates experimental performance for the stage, site-based locations, and music videos. Her performance work has been funded by the Map Fund, Doris Duke Foundation through Creative Capital, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, among others. She is a 2007 Pew Fellow in the Arts in choreography. She has choreographed music videos for Animal Collective and Black Dice, with director Danny Perez, and created devised performance work with electronic composers Christopher Sean Powell (ManMan), HPrizm (Anti-pop Consortium),  RYAT and Xenia Rubinos (ANTI records). Watson-Wallace has toured internationally as a performer, choreographer, and guest lecturer and been a guest artist at a variety of universities/venues nationally, most recently at Summerstage Central Park. She co-directs the interdisciplinary performance collective anonymous bodies with Jaamil Olawale Kosoko. She is in the inaugural class of the Low Residency MFA in studio art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she will receive her masters in early summer 2016. Kate is a 2016 Movement Research Artist in Residence.

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Ni’Ja Whitson An award-winning interdisciplinary artist, performer, and educator, New York based Ni’Ja Whitson, has been referred to as “majestic” and “powerful” by the New York Times. Recent awards include an LMCC Process Space Residency, Bogliasco Fellowship, Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist Residency, two-time Creative Capital “On Our Radar” award including being among its inaugural group, among the dozens of other residencies and awards received across disciplines. As a practitioner of indigenous and diasporic African ritual and resistance forms, they create work that reflects the sacred in street, conceptual, and indigenous performance. Proudly, they collaborate with notables in theatre, dance, visual art, and music including closely with Sharon Bridgforth and Douglas Ewart, and other leaders such as Dianne McIntyre, Oliver Lake, Edward Wilkerson Jr., Guillermo Gomez Peña / La Pocha Nostra, April Berry, Allison Knowles, Darrell Jones, and Baba Israel.  Ni’Ja Whitson is currently on faculty at the New School for Liberal Arts and is the founder/artistic director of The NWA Project.

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Larissa Velez-Jackson is a choreographer and hybrid artist who uses improvisation as a main tool for research and creation, focusing on personhood and the dancing/sound-making body. She employs a deep humor to grant audiences universal access to contemporary art’s critical discourse. LVJ has presented work at numerous NYC venues such as: Roulette, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of art and Design, (former) Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project ’10, American Realness Festival ’11 and ‘15 at Abrons Arts Center and Chocolate Factory Theater ‘14. In 2011, she launched a song-and-dance collaboration with her husband Jon Velez-Jackson called Yackez. Velez-Jackson was a Movement Research Artist-in-Residence (2012-2013), a Seniors Partnering with Artists Citywide artist-in-residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2013), an El Museo Del Barrio Artist in Residence (2014-2015), and most recently a Live Feed artist-in-residence at New York Live Arts (2015-2016). In 2012 she attended the danceWEB Scholarship Program of Impulstanz Festival with the support of a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant. She will premiere a full-length commission at New York Live Arts in 2016 that incorporates her multimedia collaborative, Yackez with her older adult aerobics students.Velez-Jackson was recently awarded the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant to Artists for 2016, on her tenth year anniversary of professionally showing work.

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Thomas O. Kriegsmann serves as Director of Programs at New York Live Arts and is Founder and President of ArKtype, a management and production company specializing in new work development and touring. Over nearly 10 years, ArKtype’s work has grown to encompass renowned artists from twenty different countries, multiple genres and commercial and non-profit support structures resulting in new work for a variety of spaces. His past work in the US and abroad includes projects with Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center Theater, Jacob’s Pillow, New York Theatre Workshop, Market Theatre (Johannesburg), Hartford Stage Company, Barbican Centre, Oxford Playhouse, Noorderzon Festival, Performance Space 122 (Fresh Terrain Festival of Performance Theater, Austin, TX), Berkeley Rep, Center Theatre Group / Mark Taper Forum, Bouffes du Nord, and The Kitchen, among many others. His acclaimed work as producer has been seen worldwide, proudly beginning his work in the production, development and touring of emerging ensembles. His work includes projects with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Peter Brook, Victoria Thiérrée-Chaplin, Yael Farber, Annie-B Parson & Paul Lazar, Lisa Peterson, Jay Scheib, Peter Sellars, Julie Taymor, and Tony Taccone. For three seasons he produced the Ringling International Arts Festival in Sarasota, FL and was Director of Programming for Spiegelworld’s South Street Seaport season. He recently premiered Big Dance Theater / Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Man In A Case, the US premiere of Nalaga’at Deaf-Blind Theater’s Not By Bread Alone, Andrew Ondrejcak & Shara Worden’s You Us We All And Elijah Green w/ John Jasperse. Ongoing collaborations include 600 Highwaymen, Rude Mechs, Byron Au Yong & Aaron Jafferis, Jessica Blank & Erik Jensen, Sam Green, and Compagnia T.P.O. Upcoming premieres include Byron Au Yong & Aaron Jafferis’ Trigger based in communities nationwide in recognition of the 10th anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre, and Jessica Blank & Erik Jensen’s How to Be a Rock Critic. www.newyorklivearts.org / www.arktype.org

Photo by Rachel Neville
André Zachery  (°1981, Chicago, United States) is a Brooklyn-based inter-disciplinary artist. He creates performances, interactive media installations, film, and sound art. He is currently a Jerome Foundation supported 2015 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, earned a BFA from the Ailey/Fordham program in 2005 and a MFA in Performance & Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) from Brooklyn College in 2014. He is a recipient of the Caroline H. Newhouse Scholarship Fund and Sono Osato Scholarship Award for Graduate Studies through Career Transitions for Dancers and PIMA Outstanding Student Award in 2013. He is also a founding member of the civic-minded performance collective – Wildcat!. Zachery was a resident media-artist at Schmiede 2014 in Hallein, Austria and received a 2015 Educational Award to art and media center Harvestworks (NYC). Zachery has designed multimedia installations and performance visuals for Bella’s Dream (Going to Tahiti Productions – 2013), My Technology (Deena Levy Studio Theatre – 2015), Gloss: MAO/Marc Jacobs Book Launch (Tunnel Club – 2015), Consider Water (Dava Fearon @ BAAD! – 2015), and The First Noel: A Christmas Musical (The Apollo Theater 2015).​

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