RECESS
RECESS is a monthly salon space where both works-in-progress and established pieces can be shared in an intimate setting. Innovation. Experimentation. Deep dives. Creative reviews. It’s all welcome here! RECESS is a safe space for exploration and forging new artistic connections. It’s an opportunity to engage performers, patrons, artists, and audience members in a night of performance and creative dialogue.
RECESS will continue to safely promote and celebrate the work of diverse artists in 2021 through virtual formats.
Want to share some work? Reach out to us and say hello!
RECESS : Into The Summer
May 31st - June 28th, 2021
Featuring:
Anh Vo, Isaiah João, Alaina Wilson, Nora Stephens, and Pioneers Go East Collective
Every Monday at 7:30pm, via ZOOM. With an additional Thursday RECESS on June 3rd!
ANH VO
May 31st, 2021 | 7:30 PM ET
Anh Vo is a Vietnamese dancer, writer, and activist. They create dances and texts about pornography and queer relations, about being and form, about identity and abstraction, about history and its colonial reality.
non-binary pussy is a revolutionary concert, fusing pope pop entertainment and political propaganda to produce an immersive experience and, ideally, a collective transformation.
Photo by Yekaterina Gyadu. BABYLIFT, Target Margin Theater, 2021.
STERLING MCCLARY
Thursday June 3rd, 2021 | 7:30 PM ET
As a graduate of Center of excellence in Performing Arts Magnet program at Pebblebrook high school, Sterling McClary is bonafide Arts enthusiast, a trained dancer in over 7 various dance styles as well as training vocally and dramatically in commercial and musical theater techniques, granting him the opportunity to perform in various venues in Georgia. After living in Pittsburgh where he studied musical theater and dance at Point Park university he gained the opportunity to share his love and passion of creating and performing in various major theatrical venues and dance studios around the country as well as spending the past four years as a performer for Celebrity and Disney cruise lines. From choreography to teaching, to casting and coaching and even recording music, Sterling has experienced entertainment at every level and has more often than not been on the right side of quality.
ISAIAH JOÃO
Monday, June 7th, 2021 | 7:30 PM ET
Isaiah João is an expressionist dancer, b-boy (Bamboozle Crew of Louisville) and student of capoeira (Cordão de Ouro, baptized under CM Xangô). Firmly rooted in their heritage, Isaiah uses their body as a vessel to emote words of spirits, exploring shape/space in a way that gives narrative to lineage.
One Man Bando de Louco is a multilayered work that looks into the mind of the obsessed. A torcida desorganizada que vive dentro de cada um. Living in both fantasy & reality, the artist explores the movements of their first love, the beautiful game: O jogo bonito...
PIONEERS GO EAST COLLECTIVE
June 14th, 2021 | 7:30 PM ET
Featuring performance artists Daniel Diaz (performer/ writer); Bree Breeden (performer/choreographer); Ori Flomin (choreographer/ performer); Shaina and Bryan Baira (choreographers/ writers); Beth Graczyk (performer); cameo video appearance by downtown icon and Stonewall witness Agosto Machado (narrator / writer). Creative director & writer Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte; Cinematography by Kathleen Kelley and Jon Burklund; Production design & writer Philip Treviño; Sound design Ryan William Downey.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION AND ARTIST BIOS.
(super powerful, supernatural, superhuman)
What does it take to be a star? A Meta creative journey
LUCKY STAR: superstar is a queer and cosmic theatre film by radical collective Pioneers Go East Collective. Part underground club inspired by the famed Club 57, part performance art. Borrowing superstardom fabulousness to celebrate queer bodies, the objectification, creative endurance, and pursuit of artistic fame, LUCKY STAR: superstar is trippy and irreverent, with performers cast as supernatural and alternate-universe superstar versions of themselves. A transmedia creative wonderland, we create a fluid interconnected queer space for supernatural experiences. In 4 episodes, artists Bree Breeden, Daniel Diaz, Ori Flomin, Shaina and Bryan Baira, and Agosto Machado bring their unique combination of cosmic-queer storytelling to the virtual space.
NORA STEPHENS
June 21st, 2021 | 7:30 PM ET
Nora Stephens is a dance artist and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. After living abroad for many years she returned to NYC in 2012. Her work has been presented in NYC at Danspace Project, the 92nd St. Y, CPR, in DancenOw/NYC, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Dixon Place, Chez Bushwick and with AUNTS among others. From 2009-12, Nora was based in Rio de Janeiro where her work was produced around town including at the Museu de Arte Moderno (MAM). Other international venues include in Mexico City, Vienna and Berlin. As a performer, she has worked most recently with Emily Wexler and Kim Brandt. Website: www.norastephens.org / IG: @norasarahstephens
pandemic frames is an embodied purging and healing. Stuck in quarantine while recovering from Covid-19, recorded is my reemergence from a forced reflection with a vulnerable body and a fluctuating sense of time. By bringing awareness to patterns and waves in the traumatized body, hope for regrowth and re-organization flourish. I examine sensation within solitude, I bite the fruit and my taste is still muted. In confinement, my one room perspective yearns for and creates its own multiplicity. This movement must be released. The dance must be made.Performed, Filmed and Edited by Nora Stephens / Music by Derek Nievergelt
S T A F F S P O T L I G H T
Jonah Bokaer arts foundation is excited to announce our june 28th recess performance featuring JBAF Company manager Alaina Wilson!
ALAINA WILSON
June 28th, 2021 | 7:30 PM ET
Alaina Wilson is a choreographer, dancer, and visual artist working out of New York, NY and North Conway, NH. She holds a BA in classics and art history from Vassar College and an MFA in dance from Sarah Lawrence College. Her choreography combines movement with elements of visual art to explore phenomena of perception within dance performance, while taking inspiration from the fields of classics, art history, performance theory, aesthetics, and their intersections. Her work has been presented at venues across NYC and the Northeast including the Actors Fund Arts Center, Access Theater, Bardavon Opera House, Chez Bushwick, Dixon Place, Eden’s Expressway, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Gibney Dance, Green Space, Northern Vermont University, TADA Theater, Triskelion Arts, and SMUSH Gallery. She was a 2019 Artist-In-Residence at Chez Bushwick in Brooklyn, NY, and she has received commissions from the MODFEST Art Festival and the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center in Poughkeepsie, NY. Her recent teaching credits include the Bronxville Ballet School and the Ailey School Junior Division.
Phora (2021) is a multidisciplinary choreographic project incorporating elements of dance, sculpture, and film. Inspired by lithic technology and the development of spoken language, the project draws on anthropological and archaeological research to consider the role of language in society today and manifestations of language within the body. The work has used a novel creation process that deemphasizes spoken language to focus instead on non-verbal and object-based encounters. This project intends to minimize the role of spoken language to distance the artistic process from the manipulation and bias often imposed by spoken language. Alaina’s RECESS presentation with feature material related to Phora (2021) developed during a 2021 residency at the Catwalk Institue in Catskill, NY.
