photo: paula lobo
Anna, Darrin, David, Eleanor, jess, Katie, Leslie & Weena:
The Door’s Unlocked
Join us for an immersive, multi-platformed, week-long event with daily rotating performances, hybrid viewing-doing sessions, and other activated public engagements. The dances, the dancers, the actions, the contents of their work will shift day and night, and we invite you inside to warm up and unfold with them.
Foley Gallery
59 Orchard Street, NYC 10002
February 3rd-9th, 2020, daily
Monday through Friday 2pm-10pm | Saturday and Sunday 12pm-9pm
Reserve tickets HERE | Donation based pricing at door. Cash or venmo accepted
MONDAY THROUGH FRIDAY
1pm Round Table Conversations with company members
2-3:30pm PUBLIC PRACTICE
4:30-6pm Company Authentic Movement Practice
6:30pm Company Self Portrait
7:30pm Company Pieces
SATURDAY
12-2pm PUBLIC PRACTICE
3-5pm Company Authentic Movement Practice
5-7pm Two Company Self Portraits
7:30pm Company Pieces
SUNDAY
12-2pm PUBLIC PRACTICE
3-5pm Company Authentic Movement Practice
5-6pm Company Self Portrait
6:30pm Company Pieces
Let’s be clear:
This is not a dance piece. This is a conjuring inside a temporariness. This is connecting the dancers with the dance. This is a negotiation of our togetherness. This is entering the unknown without demanding to know. This is Anna Witenberg, Darrin Wright, David Thomson, Eleanor Smith, jess pretty, Katie Workum, Leslie Cuyjet & Weena Pauly and what happens within a multi-year, ritualized gathering of moving, practicing, conversing, eating and making improvised dances again and again and again. It’s in the action, the ritual, the body, the form, the fantasy, the frequency, the space, the shape, the desire, the flow, the memory, the place, the passion, the reach, the imagination, the time, the fluidness, the sameness, the emptying out, the chaos, the chance, the landscape and the returning. Through these kaleidoscoping lenses we reflect our jointed worlds to cultivate meaning and to create new pathways and questions for moving and living in this chaotic world today.
Daily activations include self portraits featuring solo investigations of each company member, open public conversations, self guided public practice offerings, and evenings to witness open Authentic Movement sessions and improvised performances.
This project came about from a desire from the company to allow for expanded entry points for both observers and movers to engage with the year long “house” we have created. This house is a melding of the ritualized practice of Authentic Movement (an expressive improvisational movement practice that allows a group of participants a type of free association of the body,) improvisational dances, and the cultivation of a new culture in which today’s contemporary dance artists can thrive. By designing a format of multiplicity in engagement, the intention and purpose shifts. The work then challenges traditional hierarchies of placing the highest value upon a cumulative product and instead offers testimony to both the inescapable-ness of change itself and dance’s greatest value: the dancers themselves. Here are 8 artists with vast skill, performance histories and knowledge, capable of endless creation given a real supportive space for risk and trust. We proclaim the form of dance is a human form, where the artists are the art.
The Door’s Unlocked was developed during creative residencies at Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn, New York and The Marble House Project in Dorset, Vermont and with creative producing by Remi Harris.
