…and just like that we’ve made it to the end of the year. Before I share my final picks for 2024, I wanted to take a moment to share a few highlights from the year (’Tis almost the season for Wrapped after all).
It comes as no surprise (and testament to my impeccable taste and curatorial generosity) that my favourite performances of the year have also been Live Cultures field trips:
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R.O.S.E by Sharon Eyal (September)
BLKDOG by Botis Seva/Far From The Norm (October)
Invasive Species by Maia Novi (June)
(Special mention/joint 3rd place: Rhapsody in Blue by Iratxe Ansa & Igor Bacovich, performed by CCN/Aterballetto (September as part of Fall for Dance Festival at NY City Center)
8 glorious months of theatre with friends 🥹
2024 FIELD TRIPS by the NUMBERS
Started with an instagram story, and now we’re here!
5 field trips in 8 months:
April: Nederlands Dans Theater
June: Invasive Species
September: R.O.S.E.
October: BLKDOG
December: Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful
66 cultured patrons of the arts (with special mention to Adrian B. who has come to every single Live Cultures Field Trip)
Largest Field Trip: Nederlands Dans Theatre @ NY City Center (26 people!?)
It truly has been an incredible 8 months. I feel like I say it in every newsletter, but THANK YOU for being here and showing up. For me, the best part of Live Cultures is getting to introduce you to incredible LIVE art, and sharing in the magical state of awe together. Let’s do it again next year!
Black Aesthetics is an ongoing experimental performance art and dance series at Judson Arts that celebrates Black, radical, moving, dismantling, and subverted avant-garde experimental work. Learn more here.
You may remember reading about Dominica Greene’s solo performance, ENUF earlier this year. Dominica is back with a new project, ‘questions on i n h e r i t a n c e’, an end-of-year ceremony discussing the things we inherit which do not belong to us, but become ours. Through engaging in live conversation and movement with women who have a close relationship to new life – through motherhood or spiritual practice – it aims to draw a connection between death and birth, birth and future, future and hope. At the request of the artist, bring a person you'd want to hug, and let's do some shedding. The event is FREE to attend, just show up at Judson Memorial Church (Doors: 6:30pm, Performance: 7:30pm)
I recently attended a lecture at Columbia’s Maison Française and left completely in awe of Bintou Dembélé’s artistic philosophy and work. Dembélé returns to New York this week to host a symposium, Palabre/s en mode marron, and evening performance, Rite de passage || solo 2, at Performance Space NY. As an artist, Dembélé unearths the memories buried in bodies, souls and minds, as a living archive of another point of view on histories of French enslaved people and colonial histories more generally. Palabre/s is an iteration of a series she has presented several times in the past, which, with the blessing of the Bushnengue elders of French Guiana, allows her to invent a ‘Maroon Dance,’ a memory of marronnage – of descendants of Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean who created new, free societies on the margins of slavery and colonization.
Palabre/s en mode marron, will gather artists, academics, activists, and more with connections to Paris and the French West Indies for a day of exchanges and encounters with conversations, film screenings, readings, DJ sets, and workshops, culminating in a dance performance by Dembélé, performed by Michel “Meech” Onomo. Each night, following the symposium, Bintou Dembélé presents a movement-based work, Rite de passage || solo 2, that blends together this ritual practice of palabre with the essence of Hip Hop.
Gibney Company returns to New York Live Arts with its annual UP CLOSE series presenting a dynamic program of world, east coast and company premieres. Most notably, South African choreographer Mthuthuzeli November presents Vukani,meaning to wake up, which explores communion with the elders, searching for guidance, a provocation to the spirit to take over the body, and showing the way. I have been following November’s work for a while and his movement language blending traditional South African (Xhosa) dance and street dance along with the Western traditions of ballet and contemporary movement styles is breathing new life into stages internationally. He is also brother to Siphesihle November (Principal Dancer with National Ballet of Canada) - both need to be on your radar starting today!
My dance bias has been showing, but here’s an intriguing play for you! Katie Devin Orenstein directs Hamlet as you have never seen before. This Hamlet will be unusual, disturbing, horny, wacky, and most importantly, gay. Our company have been perfectly anti-type cast, expect the unexpected.
So excited to see some of you back at Park Avenue Armory in a few weeks! If you can’t make it to the field trip, I still highly recommend nabbing a ticket for another night. Opens Tuesday, Dec 3rd through Saturday, Dec 14th.
Stay cultured all the way into 2025 <3
Xi
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