Kathy Westwater
Dance
"Revelatory"
The New York Times
"An unconventional choreographer experiencing a surge of recognition"
"Westwater reminds us we are irrevocably connected to that original ooze and the blunt impulses contained in it."
IN THE NEWS:
NY Times Review here
NY Times Pick here
photo description:
Foregrounded and in profile,
the long hair of a dancer
whose eyes are closed is
suspended above her head.
Other dancers behind her are doing
individuated movement,
seemingly striking or
grasping the air.
photo Ian Douglas
Artists/Collaborators
ILONA BITO has performed with Kathy Westwater since 2012 as well as with Daria Faïn/The Commons Choir since 2015, and with Gamelan Dharma Swara since 2018. Bito’s choreography has been presented by Movement Research at the Judson Church, STooPS, PPL, BKSD, and more. They teach Tai Chi, Qi Gong, and Dance to all ages. Ilona holds a B.A. and MS. Ed. from Sarah Lawrence College, and became a mom in 2020. @ilonabito @taproottaichi
Performer, PARK: Collapsing Duets, Rambler: Worlds Worlds A Part, Anywhere, PARK Cycle 1
Guitarist, singer and composer MIKE BAGGETTA has performed or recorded with David Torn, Mike Watt, Jim Keltner, Nels Cline, Rev. Fred Lane, Henry Kaiser, Jeff Coffin, Psychic Temple, Ava Mendoza, Donny McCaslin, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Viktor Krauss, Tim Berne, David Wax Museum, Tom Harrell, Joseph C. Philips’ Numinous, Imani Uzuri, Jon Irabagon, Eivind Opsvik, Jeremy Udden, and Ruth Brown among many others. He can be found as a leader or sideman on record labels BIG EGO, Fresh Sound New Talent, Striped Light, ECM, Joyful Noise, New Amsterdam, Ear Up and Nomad Eel. Baggetta leads the band mssv (Main Steam Stop Valve) with drummer Stephen Hodges & bassist Mike Watt, and is an endorsing artist for Koll Guitars, Benson Amps and D'Addario Strings and Accessories.
Composer/musician, Choreomaniacs
MADELINE BEST is a Lighting Designer, Performer, and the Director of Operations at the Chocolate Factory Theater. Recent artists she has worked with include Moriah Evans, Yve Laris Cohen, Anna Sperber, Heather Kravas, Ursula Eagly, Milka Djordjevich, Efrian Rozas, luciana achugar, Andrea Kleine, Anne-B Parson/Big Dance Theater, and more. Madeline grew up in Durham, North Carolina and currently lives in Long Island City, Queens.
Lighting designer, Revolver + Choreomaniacs
MARISA CLEMENTI is a mover, maker, and vocalist whose artistic practice layers pop, postmodern, and flamenco traditions with plant medicine, writing, illustration, and nourishing food. She regularly collaborates with Storm Thomas/Theater but Dance and Tatyana Tenenbaum, and is excited to be joining Kathy Westwater's work this season. marisaclementi.com, @mclementi
Performer, PARK: Collapsing Duets, Wanderings & Moundscapes
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thomas f. defrantz directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology. Explores emerging technology in live performance applications. Believes in our shared capacity to do better and engage creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, feminist, and queer affirming.
Performer, PARK: Collapsing Duets, Rambler: Worlds Worlds A Part
JULIUS EASTMAN (1940-1990) was an artist who, as a gay, black man, aspired to live those roles to the fullest. He was not only a prominent member of New York's downtown scene as a composer, conductor, singer, pianist, and choreographer, but also performed at Lincoln Center with Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic, and recorded experimental disco with producer Arthur Russell. 'Eastman is something of a cult figure among composers and singers', reads a 1980 press release. Despite his prominence in the artistic and musical community in New York, Eastman died homeless and alone in a Buffalo, NY hospital, his death unreported until eight months later in the Village Voice. Eastman left behind few scores and recordings, and his music lay dormant for decades. In the years since, there has been a steady increase in attention paid to his music and life, punctuated by newly found recordings and manuscripts, the publication of Gay Guerrilla, a comprehensive volume of biographical essays and analysis, worldwide performances and new arrangements of his surviving works, and newfound interest from choreographers, scholars, educators, and journalists.
Composer, Rambler: Worlds Worlds A Part
CLAIRE FLEURY manipulates fabric and other materials into multidimensional, colorful garments that are an invitation to move, play, and dance. She spent twenty years directing, writing, and performing for theater, before moving to New York City from Amsterdam in 2011 when she started designing costumes and fashion for nightlife performers like Susanne Bartsch, and various dance companies. Her first three collections were sold at Patricia Field, the eponymous shop of the famed Sex and the City stylist. Fleury has created shows for Fashion Week Brooklyn, The Phluid Project, DapperQ at the Brooklyn Museum, VERS BK, at Tic Tac Art Centre in Bruxelles, and for Yoshiko Chuma, Judith Sanchez Ruíz & the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Antonio Ramos, and many others.
Costume designer, PARK: Moundscapes, Revolver + Choreomaniacs
MELANIE GEORGE has acted as a scholar-practitioner for leading dance organizations including Jacob's Pillow and Lumberyard. As an institutional and freelance dramaturg, she works closely with internationally recognized contemporary performing artists in the incubation of new works for the stage. For Lumberyard, she contributed to projects by Kimberly Bartosik/daela, Raja Feather Kelly, Susan Marshall & Company, David Dorfman Dance, Bebe Miller, and Urban Bush Women among others. As a freelance dramaturg and performance coach, she has worked with Morgan Thorson, Alice Sheppard/Kinetic Light, and Caleb Teicher & Company. Additional projects include works by David Neumann & Marcella Murray, and Helen Simoneau Danse.
Dramaturg, Rambler, Worlds Worlds A Part
LANCE GRIES has been a New York-based dance artist for almost forty years. He has taught and shown his choreography in many NYC venues and around the world, He has received numerous grants and awards, including a Bessie award for his dancing with The Trisha Brown Company and a nomination for his solo, "Etudes for an Astronaut" 2011. These days, he mostly engages in and relates to dance practices as another resource to explore life. The Covid pandemic led him into a new career of service as a life coach, combining his interests in somatic awareness, neuroscience, mindfulness and spirituality. He is currently revisiting "The FIFTY Project", a video collection of fifty improvisational duets, with fifty colleagues that celebrated his fiftieth birthday in 2013, formatting it as an accessible online archive. He is thrilled to be collaborating and dancing with Kathy in this creation.
Performer, Revolver
JOSEPH KUBERA “may be this era’s David Tudor,” wrote Robert Carl in Fanfare. A leading interpreter of contemporary music for decades, he has worked closely with such luminaries as Morton Feldman, La Monte Young, and Steve Reich. He toured widely with the Cunningham Dance Company at John Cage’s invitation. Kubera has been awarded NEA and Foundation for Contemporary Arts grants. He has recorded for Wergo, New Albion, and many other labels. Kubera worked with Julius Eastman since the 1970s, performing in his multiple-piano works and other presentations. He has directed performances of Eastman’s works around the country and abroad.
Musician, Rambler, Worlds Worlds A Part
JAE LEE has designed stage sets for dance for over two decades. He’s a licensed architect working in New York City, and has worked with numerous firmsincluding Peter Marino Architect, where he practices currently since 2013, m-USE Architects which he co-founded in 2003, and Jeffrey Beers International, where he was a director of architecture and interior design for over ten years. His architectural practice and encounters with e veryday materials inspire his designs for performance.
Visual artist, art director, set designer, PARK: Ephemera, Wanderings, Moundscapes, Revolver + Choreomaniacs, Rambler: Worlds Worlds A Part, Anywhere, PARK Cycle 1, Macho, twisted, tack, broken, The Fortune Cookie Dance
M LAMAR is a composer who works across opera, metal, performance, video, sculpture and installation to craft sprawling narratives of radical becomings. Lamar holds a BFA from The San Francisco Art Institute and attended the Yale School of Art, sculpture program, before dropping out to pursue music. Lamar’s work has been presented internationally, most recently at Kunstgebaeude Stuttgart, Funkhaus Berlin, The Meet Factory Prague, The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, National Sawdust New York, The Kitchen New York, MoMA PS1’s Greater New York, Merkin Hall, New York, Issue Project Room New York, among others.
Composer/musician, Rambler: Worlds Worlds A Part
CLARINDA MAC LOW started out working in dance and molecular biology in the late 1980s and now works in performance and installation, creating participatory events that investigate social constructs and corporeal experience. She is a professor in digital arts, and a former HIV/AIDS medical journalist. Mac Low is Executive Director of Culture Push, an experimental organization that links artistic practice and civic engagement, and co-director of Works on Water, an organization that supports art that works on, in, and with waterways in response to a changing climate. In addition to work with Westwater, Mac Low has also “performed” dramaturgy for Katy Pyle’s Ballez, David Thomson’s he his own mythical beast and Gender/Power (Maya Ciarrocchi and Kris Grey).
Dramaturg, PARK: Wanderings & Moundscapes, twisted, tack, broken
Drummer SEAN MEEHAN began performing in the 1980s at the Amica Bunker series for improvised music, located at the Anarchist’s Switchboard and later ABC No Rio in New York City. He has been presented at prestigious venues including Instal Festival (Glasgow), The Whitney Biennial, Lincoln Center, and Goethe-Institute (Hanoi), but he primarily performs at small, informal spaces and artist-run festivals. Recent projects include On the Sensations of Tone, a highly abridged audiobook of Hermann von Helmholtz’s seminal text from 1863, and Magazine, for solo cowbell. He received a 2020 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants for Artists award.
Composer/musician, PARK Cycle 2: Collapsing Duets, Wanderings, Moundscapes, PARK Cycle 1
AVA MENDOZA is a Brooklyn-based guitarist, singer, songwriter and composer. Born in 1983, she started performing her own music, and as a sidewoman and collaborator in many different projects as soon as she was legally allowed into venues. As a guitarist, Mendoza has received acclaim for her technique and viscerality. In any context she is committed to bringing expressivity, energy and a wide sonic range to the music. Mendoza has toured throughout the U.S. and Europe and recorded/performed with musicians including Carla Bozulich, Malcolm Mooney (CAN), Steve Shelley, Mike Watt, Adele Bertei, Mick Barr, William Hooker, Nels Cline, Matana Roberts, John Zorn, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Fred Frith, William Parker, Hamid Drake, Object Collection (Travis Just), ROVA, Negativland, the Violent Femmes, and members of Caroliner. She has received composition commissions from film distributor Kino Lorber, new music duo The Living Earth Show, the Jazz Coalition, and John Zorn’s Stone Commissioning Series at National Sawdust. Recordings are available on labels Tzadik, Astral Spirits, SGG, Pyroclastic, Clean Feed, Resipiscent, and New Atlantis.
Composer/musician, Revolver + Choreomaniacs
RODERICK MURRAY has been designing lighting and installations for dance, music, and opera internationally since 1989. He received a 2001 Bessie award. Murray has designed many projects for Kimberly Bartosik (BAM Next Wave, others), Ralph Lemon, Benjamin Millepied, LADP, Dusan Tynek, Wally Cardona, Yanira Castro, and Luca Veggetti. He also designed for Karen Sherman, Sekou Sundiata, Yasuko Yokoshi, Ethel, Bill Young, Roseanne Spradlin, NYCBallet, Ballet di Roma, ABT, Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève, Lyon Opèra Ballet, Ballet Collective, Melinda Ring, Donna Uchizono, Cori Olinghouse, Paul Simon, and many others.
Lighting designer, PARK: Moundscapes, Rambler: Worlds Worlds A Part, Anywhere
TOSHIMARU NAKAMURA's instrument is the no-input mixing board, which describes a way of using a standard mixing board as an electronic music instrument, producing sound without any external audio input. The unpredictability of the instrument requires an attitude of obedience and resignation to the system and the sounds it produces, bringing a high level of indeterminacy and surprise to the music. Nakamura pioneered this approach to the use of the mixing board in the mid-1990's and has since then appeared on over one hundred audio publications, including ten solo CD's. He has performed throughout Europe, North America, Argentina, New Zealand, Australia, Korea, China, Singapore, and Malaysia performing and recording both as a soloist and in collaboration with numerous other musicians.
Musician/composer, Moundscapes
JORDAN TOPIEL PAUL's work as a composer usually involves unconventional listening situations. His performances and installations have been heard on the internet, on balconies and rooftops, in apartments, canyons, motels, galleries, parks, museums, and music spaces in North America and Europe. He lives in New York City.
Musician, Wanderings
GLENN POTTER-TAKATA is a Bronx-based artist working at the intersection of Japanese religious ritual and butoh. His work centers a Japanese-American experience, and is preoccupied with the consumer culture runoff from the Japanese archipelago. Glenn is a 2022 Bronx Dance Fund recipient and a current Movement Research Artist-in-Residence. He received his MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where he focused in multimedia performance.
Performer, PARK: Collapsing Duets
In addition to dancing with Kathy Westwater since 2013, ALEX ROMANIA is a generative artist who has held residencies with Movement Research, MacDowell, and Djerassi. Romania’s current multidisciplinary work spans the evening-length work Face Eaters, to premiere at the Chocolate Factory Theater in May 2024, the feature film RECKONING (in production) created together with memoirist Stacy Lynn Smith, and co-directing the soon to be released experimental documentary feature Patch the Sky with Five Colored Stones conceived by choreographer Daria Faïn.
Performer, PARK: Collapsing Duets, Wanderings & Moundscapes, Choreomaniacs, Rambler: Worlds Worlds A Part, Anywhere; visual artist, PARK Ephemera
A native of Detroit, RAKIA SEABORN is a writer, choreographer and performer whose work has appeared at JACK, Dixon Place, La Mama E.T.C., The Tank, AUNTS, chashama and Brooklyn Studios for Dance. Seaborn has worked with Kathy Westwater, Dianne McIntyre, Rashaun Mitchell, Jodi Melnick, and Meta-Phys Ed. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2007, earning a Bachelors of Art in Dance with a concentration in Choreography, and in 2014, she gained an MFA in Dance from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a 2018 Mertz Gilmore Late Stage Creative Stipend recipient. Her latest work, A RUIN, had its world premiere at JACK in May of 2022. Instagram: @rakiadances www.rakiadances.com
Performer, PARK: Collapsing Duets, Wanderings & Moundscapes, Choreomaniacs, Rambler: Worlds Worlds A Part
PAUL SINGH holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Illinois. He has danced for Gerald Casel, Jane Comfort, Risa Jaroslow, Douglas Dunn, Christopher Williams, Will Rawls, Faye Driscoll, and was featured in the inaugural cast of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More. While abroad, he’s danced for Peter Sellars (The Indian Queen) and Peter Pleyer (work with collaborators Meg Stuart, Sasha Waltz and Jeremy Wade). Singh has presented his own work throughout NYC, in Berlin, and at the Kennedy Center. He has taught contact improvisation around the world, including for Movement Research, Sarah Lawrence College, and The Juilliard School.
Performer, Rambler: Worlds Worlds A Part
STACY LYNN SMITH is a neurodivergent, mixed race/Black performance artist, choreographer, director and Green Circle Keeper at Hidden Water (by and for those affected by CSA). Psychic Wormhole (their research platform) reckons with the devastations of trauma and its relationship to memory and the body, ultimately centering the body as memory-keeper and radical creator. They are currently developing their abstract memoir, a film, RECKONING, in collaboration with Alex Romania. Smith has been awarded a 2022 BAF Community Arts Grant, an upcoming Djerassi Residency and is a 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence.
Performer, PARK: Wanderings & Moundscapes, Choreomaniacs, Rambler: Worlds Worlds A Part
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ADAM TENDLER, a 2019 recipient of the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists and a “remarkable and insightful musician” (LA Times), is a recognized interpreter of living and modern composers. He has appeared as a soloist in all fifty United States and is the author of two books, “tidepools,” and “88x50,” a Kirkus Indie Book of the Month and Lambda Literary Award nominee. He has recorded extensively for the digital music platform, Tido, and has released an album of piano works by Robert Palmer on New World Records. More at adamtendler.com.
Musician, Rambler: Worlds Worlds A Part
NATTIE TROGDON is a performer, choreographer, and educator residing in Brooklyn, NY. Part of a collaborative duo with her life and creative partner, Hollis Bartlett; she creates dance works, films and research based practices aimed to disrupt assumptions of performance and personhood. Born and raised in rural North Carolina, she is a graduate of the high school program at UNC School of the Arts and received her BFA with honors from SUNY Purchase. www.nattieandhollis.com @nattietroggie
Performer, PARK: Collapsing Duets, Wanderings & Moundscapes, Choreomaniacs
LU YIM is a dance artist living in Queens, NY. Yim’s work is influenced by their peers and by community care practices. Recently their choreographic work has been shown at Vacation Gallery (NYC), Center for Performance Research (NYC), and collaboratively at ICA London and No Gallery (IL).
Performer, PARK: Collapsing Duets & Wanderings