Rehearsals for Rehearsal

On May 1, join us at Claudia Wieser’s installation Rehearsal at Brooklyn Bridge Park for a day of artist-instigated encounters with experimental dance and music curated by Wieser and choreographer Moriah Evans. Guest collaborating artists Katy Pyle, Angie Pittman, luciana achugar, and Evans will guide participatory dance classes from 11:00am to 5:00pm. The day will culminate in an improvised music event at 6:00pm created and curated by musician David Watson with Marcia Bassett, Daniel Carter, Marcus Cummins, Ian Douglas-Moore, Lathan Hardy, Sam Kulik, Talice Lee, Samara Lubelski, Ryan Sawyer, and Kevin Shea that responds to Wieser’s sculptures and the surrounding atmosphere.

Sunday, May 1
Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Main Street Park (Washington and Plymouth Streets), DUMBO

Rehearsal A: Sneaker Ballez with Katy Pyle: 11:00am-12:00pm
Rehearsal B: Soul Line Dancing with Angie Pittman: 12:30pm-1:30pm
Rehearsal C: Pleasure Practice with luciana achugar: 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Rehearsal D: Our Bodies Ourselves with Moriah Evans: 3:30pm – 5:00pm
Rehearsal E: Practice, practice an event curated by David Watson: 6:00pm – 8:00pm

Produced by Blaze Ferrer

All activations are free and open for the public to experience. If you wish to participate in one of the dance classes, they are first come first serve; no registration required. In the event of inclement weather, please visit @PublicArtFund on Twitter for updates.

Katy Pyle
Sneaker Ballez is an advanced ballet class. Class begins with the support of available architecture (and sculptures) to serve as barres, and moves throughout public spaces in across-the-floor combinations performed for trees and curious onlookers. Accompanied by the nostalgic and cringey queer pop hits of yesterday and today, this class invites you to focus on pleasure, connection, and personally defined virtuosity. Barre is influenced by my teacher, Janet Panetta. Wear flexible sneakers that you can turn and jump in.
-Katy Pyle

Core Participants
Elijah Jones
Josie Bettman
Julia Antinozzi
Michael Bryan Wang
Lavinia Eloise Bruce

Bio
Katy Pyle is a genderqueer lesbian dancer, choreographer and teacher. Pyle has been dancing professionally in New York City since 2002 for John Jasperse, Jennifer Monson, Faye Driscoll, Ivy Baldwin, Xavier Le Roy, and Young Jean Lee, among others. Pyle founded Ballez in 2011 to push classical ballet towards an inclusive future by centering the experiences of queer, lesbian, trans, and gender non-conforming people within the creation of large-scale story ballets, open classes, and public conversations. Major story ballets: “The Firebird, a Ballez,” Danspace Project, 2013, “Sleeping Beauty & the Beast,” La Mama, 2016 and “Giselle of Loneliness,” The Joyce, 2021. Pyle has brought Ballez to Princeton, Sarah Lawrence, Yale, Movement Research, CounterPULSE, Bowdoin, Whitman, Beloit, Slippery Rock University, Rutgers, Berea College and Swarthmore. Pyle currently teaches technique for undergraduates at Eugene Lang College and Marymount Manhattan, and professional dancers at Gibney Dance. Ballez.org

Angie Pittman
Soul Line Dancing is a result of countless communities of Black folk creating, sharing, practicing, and dancing together. Utilizing primarily R&B music, Angie Pittman will facilitate an open class and lead the public through 5-6 various Soul Line Dances that she has learned along the way. We dance together as a way to relate to each other and the space we inhabit.
-Angie Pittman

Core Participants
Malcolm-x Betts
Nile Harris
Gabriella Carmichael
Ariel Lembeck
lily bo shapiro

Bio
Angie Pittman is a New York-based dance artist, maker, and educator.  Her work has been performed at The Kitchen, Gibney Dance, BAAD!, Movement Research at Judson Church, Triskelion Arts, STooPS, The Domestic Performance Agency, The KnockDown Center, The Invisible Dog(Catch 73), The Chocolate Factory, Danspace Project, and Roulette. Angie has had the pleasure of being able to create collaboratively with A Sef, Jasmine Hearn, Jonathan Gonzalez, Athena Kokoronis, and Anita Mullin.  She holds a MFA in Dance and Choreography from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a graduate minor in African American Studies and is a certified Professional teacher of the Umfundalai technique. Her choreographic work has been supported by Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and residencies through Tofte Lake Center, Movement Research, New Dance Alliance Black Artists Space to Create, and Djerrassi. Angie’s work resides in a space that investigates how the body moves through ballad, groove, sparkle, spirit, spirituals, ancestry, vulnerability, and power. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance at Marymount Manhattan College.

luciana achugar
Pleasure Practice
This participatory project draws on achugar’s own practice developed through years of making dances as a method of unlearning from our heads and learning from our bodies; a method of radical self-acceptance rather than imposing onto our bodies any preconceived notions of being and/or behaving. Via this practice we investigate ways of uncovering what’s already present (but perhaps repressed or suppressed/oppressed) in ourselves, and how to create the conditions to let it manifest and appear on its own. The practice of being in pleasure is a practice of undoing the learned hierarchical model of embodiment that has been programmed into us and to undo the shame that comes with it to unearth a more liberated, empowered, decolonized, uncivilized self that is more connected to our instincts, our hearts, our guts, and our sex to celebrate togetherness, and connection to the earth to ourselves and to others.
-luciana achugar

Core Participants
Molly Lieber 
Michael Mahalchick
Sarah White-Ayón
Oren Barnoy

Bio
luciana achugar is a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay who grew as an artist in close dialogue with the New York and Uruguayan contemporary dance communities. She has been making work in New York City and Uruguay since 1999. 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, and was nominated for Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love (2016). She has received many accolades such as the Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, MAP Funds, Jerome Foundation, 2017 Alpert Award and NYFA Artist Grants amongst other accolades. Her most recent and ongoing current work “PURO TEATRO: A Spell for Utopia” began as an online project on instagram commissioned by and for the Portland Institute of Contemporary Arts’ Time-Based Art Festival in the Fall of 2020, and was premiered as a live performance at The Chocolate Factory Theater co commissioned by NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in November 2021. She is currently a 2022 USA Doris Duke Fellow.

Moriah Evans
Our Bodies Ourselves
We will work with a speculative relationship to one’s own body and the bodies of others to grasp what our bodies contain. Feminisms are the groundwork for a dancing methodology initiated from deep inside the body’s internal organs. We will work with a system of perception-action through five distinct energetic modalities. We will articulate movement from individualized sensation remaining forever unknown and perpetually subjective, abandoning representations often projected onto a body’s surface. How might we access notions of waste within the body to expel it? We will sustain cathartic events towards states of self and flesh and then investigate what transpires in their wake, remains.
-Moriah Evans

Core Participants
Lizzie Feidelson
Kris Lee
Joao dos Santos Martins
Sarah Beth Percival
Varinia Canto Vila

BIO
Moriah Evans’ work positions dance and choreography as a speculative process. Developing movement from the unseen, yet felt, worlds of a body’s materiality and affective interior space, Evans’ projects question default hierarchies between flesh, body, self, and subject. Drawing on both feminist critiques of visuality and somatic choreographic practices, Evans’ work expands a relation to dance beyond the visible, towards different ways of sensing ourselves and our relations to one another. Recent works include: REPOSE (Beach Sessions, ΝY, 2021) BASTARDS: We are all Illegitimate Children (NYU Skirball, ΝY, 2019); Configure (The Kitchen, ΝY, 2018); Figuring (SculptureCenter, ΝY, 2018); Be my Muse (Pace Live, NY, 2021; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, 2018; Villa Empain, Brussels, 2016); Social Dance 9-12: Encounter (Danspace Project, ΝY, 2015); Social Dance 1-8: Index (ISSUE Project Room, ΝY, 2015); Another Performance (Danspace Project, ΝY, 2013); and Out of and Into (8/8): STUFF (Theatre de l’Usine, Geneva, 2012). In 2011 Evans initiated The Bureau for the Future of Choreography—a collective created to investigate participatory performances and choreographic systems. Evans was Editor-in-Chief of the Movement Research Performance Journal (2013-2020), Curatorial Advisor for the Tanzkongress (2019), and since 2016 has been a Co-Curator/Facilitator of Dance and Process (The Kitchen). She is a Foundation for Contemporary Art Individual Artist Awardee, MacDowell Fellow, and 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in Choreography.

David Watson
Practice, practice
A sequence of improvisatory musical responses throughout the park that rotate around Rehearsal and the surrounding park area. These responses are guided by the locations and an exploration of their own sonic properties. Inspired by the idea of a “rehearsal” as a cultural form and its difference from performance with inherent ideas of public and private, these responses are guided by Wieser’s sculptures and the musicians own histories.
-David Watson

Core Participants
Marcia Bassett – analog synth
Daniel Carter – alto sax
Marcus Cummins – soprano sax
Ian Douglas-Moore – guitar, electronics
Lathan Hardy – sax
Sam Kulik – tuba
Talice Lee – violin
Samara Lubelski – violin
Ryan Sawyer – drums
Kevin Shea – drums
David Watson – bagpipes

Bio
David Watson is an experimental musician, an integral figure in the New York scene since the 1980’s. His specialty is new music for the bagpipe. He has consistently made experimental music as a public work (including for brass bands and pipe bands) to explore locations through sound. Recently The New York Times described “Cooped”, a piece he made with choreographer Jamar Roberts, as “one of the most powerful artistic responses yet to the Covid-19 crisis”. He has organized and curated experimental music over a forty year period.     https://davidwatsonmusic.net