Michael Helland kicks off the thirtieth Performance Mix Festival with RECESS: DANCE OF LIGHT (photo by David Gonsier)
Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
June 6-11, free – $20
212-598-0400
newdancealliance.org
www.abronsartscenter.org
The thirtieth Performance Mix Festival returns to its original home this week, presenting more than three dozen emerging and midcareer dance artists and companies in fifteen events at the Abrons Arts Center, celebrating the past while looking toward the future. Focusing on experimental, multidisciplinary works, the festival has also been held at such locations as Dixon Place, the Joyce SoHo, HERE, and Dance Theater Workshop. The 2016 edition of PMF opens June 6 with Michael Helland’s site responsive one-man live-sculpture show RECESS: Dance of Light, which promises to “recharge your batteries and combat the symptoms of neoliberal fatigue.” On June 7, “Path Breakers Create Ever-Evolving Worlds of Performance” consists of Michael Freeman’s It’s not that I have anything against living…, Headlong and the Riot Group’s Magic Wand, an excerpt from James & Jen | McGinn & Again’s a Gram & a Gone, and Johanna S. Meyer’s work in progress Handbuilt. On June 8, the free “Edgy NYC” brings together feminist performance and video by Susana Cook, Jess Dobkin, Rebecca Patek and T. L. Cowan & Jasmine Rault as Mrs. Trixie Cane & Her Handsome Cellist, and festival founder and director Karen Bernard. On June 9, “Typography, Images, Landscape, Heightened Drama” pairs Jil Guyon’s Desert Widow with GREYZONE’s Drift. On June 10, “Three Artists…Three Fantastical/Fanciful Perspectives on Performance” comprises Melinda Ring and Renée Archibald’s Renée vs the Rectangle, Paula Josa-Jones | Performance Works’ Speak, and Patti Bradshaw and Valerie Striar’s Flowers in Space. The festival concludes June 11 with “Three Genres of Improvisation: Contact Improvisation, Spontaneous Connections: Improvised Music, and Raise the Hoof: Tap,” with Patrick Crowley, Carly Czach, Rob Flax, Elise Knudson, Tim O’Donnell, and Sarah Young (contact improvisation), David Garland, Anaïs Maviel, and Roxane Butterfly (improvised music), and Jane Goldberg, Max Pollak, Brinae Ali, and Jennifer Vincent (tap). Among the other performers over the course of the festival are LAVA, Yasuko Yokoshi, Rachel Thorne Germond, Arthur Avilés, Emily Wexler, and Louise Moyes and the Daly Collective, who will deliver a free excerpt from If a Place Could Be Made: Kitty and Daniel Daly of St. Mary’s Bay Newfoundland, Had 12 Children, Six of Whom Were Very Tall and Six of Whom Had Achondroplasia, or Dwarfism.