Who: Beau Bree Rhee, Caitlin Scranton, Bria Bacon, Cara McManus, Chaery Moon
What: Free live performances
Where: Madison Square Park
When: Wednesday, September 21, Wednesday, October 12, Thursday, October 20, free, 6:00
Why: Madison Square Park Conservancy has teamed up with the Kitchen to present three live, site-specific performances by choreographer Beau Bree Rhee activating Cristina Iglesias’s Landscape and Memory installation, which is on view through December 4. Iglesias’s captivating public intervention consists of a stream that winds through the grass in five bronze sculptural pools, referencing Cedar Creek and Minetta Brook, which once upon a time flowed across the park, heading for the East or Hudson River. Each pool offers its own calming respite, with water gently babbling against rocks. The work morphs slowly over time, first as the grass grows wildly over and around it during the summer, while the coming fall will change it yet again.
Bree’s eight-stanza dance poem, Shadow of the Sea, begins with thirty-minute coastal-walk preludes, referred to by Bree as a Brutal Meditation, at 5:00 at the East River Promenade at East Tenth St. and Pier 64 in Hudson River Park (attendance free with RSVP), with two migratory processions marching toward the Oval Lawn in Madison Square Park, where Caitlin Scranton, Bria Bacon, Cara McManus, and Chaery Moon will perform at 6:00 on September 21 and October 12 and 20. Bree has previously incorporated nature into such pieces as Les Parages, Figure Void to Lithic Landscapes, and the ongoing Dream Garden in the Anthropocene, so this work should be a natural for her.