this week in dance

INSITU SITE SPECIFIC DANCE FESTIVAL

Jody Oberfelder Projects will present Audience of One in Gantry Plaza State Park as part of INSITU dance festival

Hunters Point Park, Gantry Plaza State Park, Queensbridge Park, Socrates Sculpture Park
July 8-9, free, 12 noon – 7:00
www.insitudancefestival.com

If free, outdoor, site-specific dance is your thing — and really, if it’s not, it should be — then you need to check out INSITU, taking place July 8-9 in four parks along the Long Island City waterfront. Each day, from 12 noon to 7:00, multiple dance companies will perform several times in various sections of the parks; the schedule has been arranged so it’s possible to catch every company in a single day (with the help of guides). Produced by KINEMATIK Dance Theater in community partnership with Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement, Hunters Point Parks Conservancy, Chocolate Factory Theater, Socrates Sculpture Park, and LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, INSITU features an impressive, wide-ranging lineup (with the name of the piece they will be performing in parentheses): Hivewild (Raft), Kimberly Tate + Akim Funk Buddha (DANCITECTURE), BS Movement (Peur), Movement of the People Dance Company (Word Is Audubon), the Equus Projects/OnSite NYC (Mandala Insitu), and Christopher Unpezverde Núñez (The Sun Sets Twice on the Same Day) in Hunter’s Point South Park; Zullo/RawMovement (Our Garden / How Exquisite Eternity / The Piers), Kate Moore and Brendan Duggan (The Goodbye Party), Melissa Riker / Kinesis Project dance theatre (Timepiece, or: Another Imperfect Measurement of Us), Carte Blanche Performance/Shandoah Goldman (Hoist + Sulk), Jody Oberfelder Projects (Audience of One), Loni Landon Dance Project (Waterfront), and Grounded View (Bench Talk) in Gantry Plaza State Park; PROJECT 44 (Fragile), Community Workshop and Performance Group, KrisSeto and ShoeySun [VESSELS] (10,500 Departures), Parcon NYC (Beyond Playing Chicken), KINEMATIK Dance Theater (From the Inside Out), and Lucy Kerr (Sleep Piece) in Queensbridge Park; and Dance Entropy/Valerie Green (Immeasurable), Wilder Project (Seed), Only Child Aerial Theatre (Framework), the Blue Bus Project and Tyler Gilstrap (The Great Dictator), tedted Performance Group (Cycles), and violetsound (Terroir) in Socrates Sculpture Park. There will also be a cash-bar after-party on July 9 at 7:00 at Anable Basin Sailing at 4-40 44th Dr.

TWI-NY TALK: JODY OBERFELDER — THE BRAIN PIECE

Jody Oberfelder Projects will present The Brain Piece at New York Live Arts June 28 – July 1 (photo by Christopher Duggan)

JODY OBERFELDER PROJECTS: THE BRAIN PIECE
New York Live Arts
219 West 19th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Wednesday, June 28, gala benefit $200, 7:30
June 29 – July 1, $25-$35, 7:00 & 9:00
212-691-6500
newyorklivearts.org
www.jodyoberfelder.com

New York-based director, choreographer, dancer, and filmmaker Jody Oberfelder’s The Brain Piece, premiering at New York Live Arts June 28 – July 1, continues her exploration of our internal organs, following on her extraordinary 2013 piece, 4Chambers, an immersive, multimedia, interactive journey inside the human heart. Performed by Oberfelder, Mary Madsen, Pierre Guilbault, and Hannah Wendel along with ten dancer docents, The Brain Piece is divided into two parts, “Mind Matters / Head Space” and “World of Brain,” combining film, visual art, installation, dance, music, and text for an audience limited to 72 members. The cerebral, multimedia piece includes her award-winning short film Dance of the Neurons, made with Eric Siegel, which turns firing synapses into a colorful, joyous dance. Oberfelder, a travel and yoga enthusiast and former lead singer of the punk band the Bagdads, founded Jody Oberfelder Projects in 1989 and has previously presented such works as The Titles Comes Last, Moved, Re:Dress, and Throb. The charming, gregarious, always energetic creator took a break from rehearsals to tell twi-ny all about The Brain Piece.

twi-ny: We recently bumped into each other at the Whitney Biennial, where you were serving as a docent for Asad Raza’s “Root sequence. Mother tongue,” an installation of living trees paired with specific objects, one of which you contributed. As museumgoers made their way through the exhibit, I couldn’t help but think of it as a kind of improvisatory dance with nature, especially with you there. What was that experience like?

jody oberfelder: We’re actually called caregivers. The people who pass through sometimes don’t know we’re positioned as such as we, as you describe, do this improvisatory dance with people in conversation. The show has been up since March and we’ve seen the trees go from bare, to blossom, to leafing, and now they can’t wait to get planted outside. Many people have passed through. Asad’s work balances organic, inorganic, and human all in the space. Having a person in the room is as important as the trees and the caregiver’s placed object. I’m learning that conversation is often this invisible thread that links things together in the present.

twi-ny: Your work is very scientific; were you interested in science when you were a kid?

jo: I would not say I grew up with a scientific bent. I had a fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Dowd, who explained the digestive system with panache (“…and out the other end” — we were all snickering). I’ve come to science through the body, and through a curiosity about what makes us alive. There is a beautiful ecosystem within us and a giant cosmos outside of us. Did you ever see that film by Charles and Ray Eames — Powers of Ten — it’s all about zooming out and zooming in. That, to me, is what science is about. Things can be very specific and very vast.

twi-ny: Yes, Powers of Ten is quite eye-opening. How did you find/choose your science collaborators — Dr. Wei Ji Ma, Cecilia Fontanesi, and Ed Lein — and what did each one bring to The Brain Piece?

Word of mouth.

Cecilia is a dancer and a neuroscientist. She met one of my dancers, Mary Madsen, at a party. I loved talking with her from the very beginning. The thing she said, “The brain is everywhere in the body,” totally clicked with my premise of dancers illuminating brain life.

Wendy Suzuki, who helped illuminate the brain-body connection for me, introduced Wei Ji to me. Wei Ji has been a great collaborator. He comes to rehearsals to “fact check” and advise. He’s in Dance of the Neurons. I audited his class at NYU on illusion. We did a combo lecture / performance in Amsterdam.

Another neuroscientist introduced Ed Lein to me: Gary Marcus. My company manager at the time, Clare Cook, was giving him private Pilates lessons. Gary and I had several conversations, which culminated in him saying, “You know, you should meet Ed from the Allen Institute for Brain Science. He specializes in the biology of neurons.” Ed and I had a back and forth on a kind of Skype sketchpad, and he drew little pictures of how neurons are formed that eventually became the literal storyboard for Dance of the Neurons. I embellished, of course, and played with all the ways neurons “dance” and form synaptic connection. I’m most grateful to these scientists, who are also artists.

twi-ny: Without giving too much away, how will the physical space of New York Live Arts come into play? Only the second half will take place in the theater on a proscenium stage, correct?

jo: It’s my hope that there really is no separation between the sections, that the more experience-based portions of the work continue to inform the world of the brain in the theater. There are nine films in part two. When you go to movies, you don’t question that the actors are not that big. I think the problem with live theater is that we’re in a long shot for too long. I’m creating an atmosphere of a giant brain with moving parts. I think this is the nature of brain plasticity: zoom in for close-ups, see what the alignment of neurons are doing at this time, how we’re constantly in a perceptual loop.

Jody Oberfelder served as a caregiver for Asad Raza’s “Root sequence. Mother tongue” at the Whitney Biennial (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Jody Oberfelder served as a caregiver at the Whitney Biennial (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

twi-ny: 4Chambers involved a significant amount of interaction, at one point bringing the audience into physical contact with the dancers. Will there be anything similar in The Brain Piece?

jo: You’ll see.

twi-ny: Good answer. I only recently learned that the doctor who performed the autopsy on Albert Einstein actually removed his brain and brought it home to study. What is the most unusual thing you learned about the brain while making this piece?

jo: That the brain is a noisy place and we’re constantly trying to figure things out and make sense of the world. And that our bodies are the vehicles for us to sensorially enter the world. Ask a neuroscientist to define “mind” and they have no clear thing to pin down. There were philosophers, then psychiatrists, and now great discoveries in seeing the pictures in the brain, seeing what makes things go off, decay, or become more plastic, make connections: That’s the dance of neurons. But the mind — it’s like vapor. We breathe in present and past. It’s in constant motion. And dancers are the perfect vehicles to convey this movement.

twi-ny: How have the two works brought the heart and the mind together for you?

jo: The heart leads to the mind. When working on 4Chambers, I interviewed Wendy, who talked about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system and how all the way down from our brains our hearts operate. We feel our hearts, but it’s triggered by the mind. You know how what your brain is doing by what your heart is doing, and vice versa. “I can put my hand on your heart and feel your heartbeat, but if I put my hand on your skull, I can’t feel your thoughts.”

twi-ny: Regarding Dance of the Neurons, your choreography has always been very cinematic, and The Brain Piece includes that short film, which has been garnering prizes at festivals. How do you see the two disciplines merging in your work?

jo: Thank you. Someone at a festival said I was a filmic choreographer. I like that. I’m pretty visual. Like a filmmaker, I’m in the business of arranging time and space and hidden narrative. I use a lot of improvisation around ideas and look for dancers who can take the ball and run with it. I like to think that if I give the performers imaginative tasks, the content will form, and it’s my job as a director and choreographer to prepare for a rehearsal with a loose storyboard of possibilities, then go deeply inside the physical investigation for the interaction with audience members, the films, and the onstage content. Devising content is a matter of honing in on what feels right.

I worked with a wonderful dramaturg this time around: Jessica Applebaum. The piece has had many renderings. She helped me not be afraid of the complexity of the subject matter and to go forward making. Details and big picture always in mind. Jessica has also left me a lot of space these last months to figure it out on my own. Today our neuroscientist, Wei Ji, was there to see me finish the finale in our last moments of our last rehearsal!

I love it now. I’m even surprised by it.

twi-ny: I’m very much looking forward to being surprised by it as well. This might be an obvious closing question, but now with the heart and the brain covered, do you anticipate continuing to explore the mind-body connection with different organs as the focus?

jo: The sex organs will probably be combined with the guts. Like when you feel something in your gut. Intuition. Power.

SlowDancing / TrioA

Yvonne Rainer, Pat Catterson, and Richard Move perform Trio A in new collaboration with David Michalek (photo by Mark Kornbluth)

Danspace Project
St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery
131 East Tenth St. between Second & Third Aves.
June 23 – July 1, free (advance RSVP recommended), 6:00 – 10:00 pm
866-811-4111
www.danspaceproject.org

Photographer David Michalek and choreographer Yvonne Rainer have teamed up on SlowDancing/TrioA, a free multimedia installation on view nightly at Danspace Project from June 23 through July 1 from 6:00 to 10:00. Ten years ago, Michalek first showed Slow Dancing, hyper-slow-motion videos of dancers and choreographers filmed for five seconds and stretched into ten-minute portraits. “I love dance. I love watching it. I love what dancers do, who they are, and what they stand for,” Michalek, who is married to Wendy Whelan, explains on his website about the series. Michalek has now turned his attention to Rainer’s iconic 1966 Trio A, which was part of the larger work The Mind Is a Muscle. “The dance has been understood as inaugurating a new field of practice that embraced laconic movements and ordinary bodies, and helped usher in postmodern, task-based dance,” Berkeley associate professor of art history Julia Bryan-Wilson wrote in October magazine in 2012. “In addition, Trio A has refigured what it means to talk about the medium — or mediums — of contemporary art.” For their collaboration, Michalek filmed forty-six dancers performing the approximately five-minute piece, with each participant getting seven seconds onscreen. The cast includes Siobhan Burke, Emily Coates, Robbie Cook, Jodi Melnick, Elliot Mercer, Richard Move, Wendy Perron, Stephen Petronio, Francisca Quintanilla, Macy Sullivan, David Thomson, Isabelle Vergara, Timothy Ward, Rainer, Whelan, and Raindears company member Pat Catterson, who worked with Rainer on the project and performed the piece at MoMA in 2009. There will be a trio of 6:30 conversations during the week-long run, with choreographer Hilary Easton on June 24, Lydia Bell on June 27, and Judy Hussie-Taylor on June 29, who all contributed to a print program guide as well. “Trio A is a dance that both does and does not want to perform, both does and does not want to be filmed,” Coates writes in the guide. “So it alters the expectations of the medium. Yvonne ‘Trio A-ifies’ David’s screens from within, forcing viewers, yet again, to reconsider their own desires in relation to an image. . . . Trio A questions the nature of performance itself.” Admission is free but advance RSVP is recommended here.

L.A. DANCE PROJECT AT THE JOYCE: PROGRAM B

Tyler Peck’s Murder Ballades teems with energy in L.A. Dance Project production (photo by Rose Eichenbaum)

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
June 13-25, $26-$66
212-242-0800
www.joyce.org
www.ladanceproject.com

Upon entering the Joyce on Saturday night, June 17, to see Benjamin Millepied’s L.A. Dance Project, we were sad to hear that the performance of the brand-new duet In Silence We Speak had been canceled due to an injury. However, the three pieces that remained, all very different, made up a program that still worked extremely well. First was New York City Ballet wunderkind Justin Peck’s 2013 Murder Ballades, his debut as a contemporary dance choreographer. The curtain is raised, revealing six pairs of sneakers onstage, in front of Sterling Ruby’s colorful abstract backdrop of vertical and horizontal bars. Stephanie Amurao, Aaron Carr, Julia Eichten, Nathan Makolandra, Robbie Moore, and Rachelle Rafailedes, all in casual modern-day dress (Peck did the costume design), enter, lace on the sneakers, and proceed to run around the stage, the buzz of sudden freedom in the air, as if Peck is breaking free of ballet en pointe, at least momentarily. (He continues to dance and choreograph for NYCB.) Over the course of six sections, the dancers appear to be having a great time as they divide into solos and duets, including a lovely pas de deux between Makolandra and Rafailedes, and intersect in fluid trios and a variety of lines and patterns. At one point, Carr actually pauses to look at Ruby’s painting, making sure we all acknowledge its grandeur. Peck displays an infectious glee with his vigorous movement language, although it can get repetitive and a little too showy, but it works breathlessly with Bryce Dessner’s energetic score and Brandon Stirling Baker’s pinpoint lighting.

L.A. Dance Project performance of Merce Cunninghams MinEvent is exquisite (photo by James Welling)

L.A. Dance Project performance of Merce Cunningham’s MinEvent is exquisitely rendered (photo by James Welling)

Next was Merce Cunningham’s MinEvent, a 2006 majestic collage that is like a Mondrian canvas brought to glorious life. Arranged and staged by Silas Riener, it’s performed by Amurao, Carr, Eichten, Makolandra, Moore, David Adrian Freeland Jr., and Lilja Rúriksdóttir, wearing tight black costumes, designed by Millepied, marked with spare, rectilinear thin stripes of color, the women’s and men’s costumes mirror images of each other. The often staccato, almost mechanical abstract movement, sudden stops and starts that seem to presage voguing but with blank facial expressions, form Mondrian-esque geometric patterns, not just with the shapes of the bodies, but with how the lines on the costumes merge. John Cage’s “Music for Piano” is performed live by Adam Tendler, who is like a seventh dancer, having to stand so he can pluck the strings inside of the instrument in addition to playing the regular keys, the minimalist score balancing sound with silence.

Benjamin Millipied mixes live action with cinema in world premiere of Orpheus Highway at the Joyce (photo by Erin Baiano)

The evening concluded with Millepied’s adventurous, multimedia Orpheus Highway, making its world premiere at the Joyce. The piece is set to Steve Reich’s stirring “Triple Quartet,” played live by PUBLIQuartet, featuring Curtis Stewart and Jannina Norpoth on violin, Nick Revel on viola, and Amanda Gookin on cello. Wearing contemporary clothing and sneakers (the costumes were designed by Millepied), Morgan Lugo, Amurao, Carr, Eichten, Freeland Jr., Makolandra, Moore, Rúriksdóttir, and Janie Taylor (replacing Rafailedes) dance in front of a film of themselves (but with Rafailedes instead of Taylor) that Millepied shot in Marfa, Texas, on the local streets, down a narrow alley, and on an endless highway in the middle of nowhere. Freeland Jr. and Taylor reenact the tragic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, as all the live dancers move in opposition to, in unison with, and completely differently from their screen doppelgängers. There’s a lot going on, so you’re not always sure where to look, and your mind can’t help but try to make sense of how the filmed images relate to the live ones, but just let it unfold without thinking too hard about it. In some ways, it’s an innovative combination of the two works that preceded it. The two-week Joyce run continues through June 25; Program A consists of Millepied’s Hearts & Arrows, Ohad Naharin’s Yag, and In Silence We Speak if Carla Korbës has recovered.

THE RECEPTION

Donovan & Calderón throw a party to remember in The Reception, continuing at HERE through June 24 (photo by Maria Baranova)

HERE
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
June 14-24, $25 (use discount code BUBBLY to save $5) – $45, 8:30
212-647-0202
www.here.org
www.donovanandcalderon.org

This is one party you are not going to want to miss. HERE Resident Artists Donovan & Calderón invite audiences to a rather surreal gathering in the exhilaratingly funny and utterly bizarre dance-theater piece The Reception, continuing at HERE through June 24. Actor, dancer, and writer Sean Donovan and actor, director, and scholar Sebastián Calderón Bentin have been collaborating since 2003 on such cutting-edge works as Not Unclear, The Climate Chronicles, and 18½ Minutes. For The Reception, they have put together quite a guest list: master choreographers Jane Comfort and Ishmael Houston-Jones, performer and choreographer Leslie Cuyjet, actress Hannah Heller, and the well-mustachioed Donovan himself, an extremely talented comic actor who was a standout in such recent productions as the Builders Association’s Elements of Oz and the first two parts of Faye Driscoll’s Thank You for Coming trilogy. The five fabulously dressed partygoers — the costumes are by Felix Ciprián, with Heller’s sparkling gown a particular stunner — drink, dance, nosh, and schmooze on Neal Wilkinson’s circular wooden stage, cluttered with a couch, a few chairs, a table of snacks and bottles of alcohol, and a light-up globe. Snippets of dialogue come front and center and then disappear into the background, ranging from silly jokes to more serious tales of sexism, misogyny, and ageism, as Houston-Jones tries to score with every other character in hysterical ways. Words and actions repeat, high-heeled shoes come off and are put back on, and Donovan grows ever-more desirous of the “tarty things,” all set to Stevie Wonder’s infectious “Another Star” from his groundbreaking 1976 double album, Songs in the Key of Life. Tension and anxiety wax and wane, stimulated by a sly little take on a fundamental horror movie trope. The fun sound design is by Brandon Wolcott and Tyler Kieffer, which is complemented by Amanda K. Ringger’s inventive lighting, especially when the story takes a creepy turn. And the ending is splendidly mad.

Hannah Heller, Sean Donovan, Leslie Cuyjet, Jane Comfort, and Ishmael Houston-Jones hold nothing back in The Reception (photo by Maria Baranova)

Codirected by Calderón and Donovan, The Reception was inspired by such classic European cinema as Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, Jacques Tati’s Playtime, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura. It was originally titled “Abbadon,” which in Hebrew means “place of destruction” and in Revelation refers to a king who was the “angel of the Abyss,” a hellish place of confinement. The five characters are trapped in their own private sphere, alternating between being deliriously happy, then nervous and worried, concerned for their immediate future. The social-gathering aspects of the show are beautifully precise even with improvisation, expertly detailing the interaction among the bash attendees, from movement to language to facial gesture, especially since all of the performers have collaborated previously on multiple projects: Cuyjet has danced with Jane Comfort and Company since 2005, Donovan and Heller both portrayed Dorothy Gale (and other roles) in Elements of Oz, and Houston-Jones and Comfort teamed up for The Studies Project, among other collaborations, making the proceedings that much more believable no matter how strange it gets. But underneath it all, literally and figuratively, lies the unknown, a dark side from which there might be no escape. In which case, the only thing to do is to keep on partying.

NYC PRIDE 2017

VIP Rooftop Party is a highlight of NYC Pride Week

Multiple locations
June 16-25, free – $625
www.nycpride.org

Showing one’s pride is more than just using a rainbow flag emoji on Facebook. You can wave the flag much higher by attending any of these special pride events, the first Pride Week held under President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence; as always, the ticketed events are selling out fast, so you better act quickly if you want to shake it up at some pretty crazy parties.

Friday, June 16
The Rally, Foley Square, free, 6:00 – 8:00 pm

Sunday, June 18
Pride Luminaries Brunch, with special guests, the Garden at David Burke, 23 Grand St., $60, 1:00 – 4:00 pm

Monday, June 19
OutCinema, screening of Cherry Pop (Assaad Yacoub, 2016) and open-bar after-party, with Bob the Drag Queen, Detox, and Tempest DuJour in person, SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd St., $30, 7:30 pm

Tuesday, June 20
Family Movie Night: The Lion King (Roger Allers & Rob Minkoff, 1994), hosted by Miss Richfield 1981, Pier 45, Hudson River Park at Christopher St., free (reserved seating $50), 8:30 pm

Wednesday, June 21
Village Voice Pride Awards, hosted by Alan Cumming, Capitale, 130 Bowery, 6:00 pm

Friday, June 23
Moxie, with Mary Lambert and DJs Mary Mac and Susan Levine, Taj II Lounge, 48 West 21st St., $25-$48, 4:00 – 11:00 pm

Fantasy, with DJs Ralphi Rosario and Eddie Martinez and special secret performances, Highline Ballroom, 431 West 16th St., $39-$79, 11:00 pm – 5:00 am

Friday, June 23
through
Sunday, June 25
Pride Island, with Deborah Cox, DJ Lina, and Patti Labelle on Friday, Tegan and Sara, Years & Years, Roisin Murphy, Gallant, Dimitri from Paris, and Occupy the Disco on Saturday, and DJ Scott Martin, DJ Cindel, Chus & Ceballos, and Nelly Furtado on Sunday, Pier 26, Hudson River Park at Laight St., $35-$180

This year’s Fantasy party promises special secret performances at the Highline Ballroom

Saturday, June 24
Youth Pride, with interactive games, activities, and live entertainment, free with advance registration, 14th St. Park, 12 noon – 6:00 pm

VIP Rooftop Party, with DJs Alex Acosta, GSP, and Hannah and secret acts all night long, Hudson Terrace, 621 West 46th St., $69-$85, 2:00 – 10:00 pm

Teaze (formerly known as Rapture on the River), exclusive party for women only, with DJs Taryn Manning and Tatiana, the DL, 95 Delancey St., $48-$80, 4:00 – 10:00 pm

Masterbeat: Game Show, Hammerstein Ballroom, 311 West 34th St., $120-$140, 10:00 pm – 6:00 am

Sunday, June 25
PrideFest, twenty-fourth annual street fair with music, food, merchandise, and live performances by LeAnn Rimes and many others, Hudson St. between Abingdon Sq. & West 14th St., free (special packages $10-$625), 11:00 am – 6:00 pm

The March, with grand marshals the American Civil Liberties Union, Brooke Guinan, Krishna Stone, and Geng Le, Lavender Line from 36th St. & Fifth Ave. to Christopher & Greenwich Sts., free, 12 noon

Femme Fatale, women’s rooftop party with DJs Nikki Lions, Mary Mac, and Tatiana, Hudson Terrace, 621 West 46th St., $25-$60, 4:00 – 10:00 pm

RIVER TO RIVER 2017

Maria Hassabi presented an informal preview of her latest work this summer on the High Line (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The latest iteration of Maria Hassabi’s Staged series will move be performed in City Hall Park as part of the River to River Festival (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Multiple locations downtown
June 14-25, free
www.rivertorivernyc.com
lmcc.net

The best free multidisciplinary arts festival of the summer, River to River packs a whole lot into a narrow amount of time. Sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, this year’s activities, which, as always, focus on more experimental presentations, take place June 14-25 at such locations as Governors Island, Federal Hall, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Fulton Center, City Hall Park, and other downtown areas. While everything is free, some performances require advance registration because of space considerations. In addition to the below events, Katja Novitskova’s “EARTH POTENTIAL” Public Art Fund exhibition opens June 22 in City Hall Park, photographer Kamau Ware’s “Black Gotham Experience” interactive storytelling project will pop up at various places throughout the fest, LMCC’s Open Studios allows visitors the chance to meet with dozens of artists, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s “A Supple Perimeter” will be on view at LMCC’s Arts Center and Movie Theater Exterior on Governors Island.

Wednesday, June 14, 6:00
Wednesday, June 21, 8:00
Sunday, June 25, 7:00
The Dance Cartel: R2R Living Rooms, with DJ Average Jo and special guests, Pier A Harbor House
One of the most energetic companies around, the Dance Cartel will host a trio of live music and dance performances at the River to River Festival hub, with plenty of audience participation.

Thursday, June 15, 3:00 & 6:00
Monday, June 19, 3:00
Netta Yerushalmy: Paramodernities #2 and #3, National Museum of the American Indian
South Carolina–born choreographer and performer Netta Yerushalmy’s “Paramodernities” series deconstructs landmark dance works within the framework of modernity. For River to River, she will present Paramodernities #2, examining Martha Graham’s Night Journey, and Paramodernities #3, investigating Alvin Ailey’s Revelations, accompanied by scholars who will take part in public discussions. The seventy-five-minute production will move around inside the National Museum of the American Indian.

Thursday, June 15, 7:00
Saturday, June 17, 7:00
Sunday, June 18, 7:00
A Marvelous Order, Fulton Center
Joshua Frankel, Judd Greenstein, Will Rawls, and Tracy K. Smith have collaborated on the multimedia opera A Marvelous Order, which delves into the famous fight between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs over the future development of New York City. For the River to River Festival, they will present a twenty-five-minute excerpt at the Fulton Center, with Eliza Bagg, Tomás Cruz, Lucy Dhegrae, Christopher Herbert, and Dashon Burton as Robert Moses and live music by NOW Ensemble, conducted by David Bloom.

Friday, June 16, 6:00
Amir Elsaffar: Rivers of Sound — Not Two, the Plaza at 28 Liberty
American jazz trumpeter and composer Amir Elsaffar celebrates the release of his latest record, Not Two (New Amsterdam, June 16), with a two-hour performance at the Plaza at 28 Liberty featuring his seventeen-piece Rivers of Sound orchestra.

Friday, June 16, 3:30
Saturday, June 17, 3:30
Sunday, June 18, 3:30
Jodi Melnick: Moat, Fort Jay, Governors Island
Choreographer, dancer, and teacher Jodi Melnick, who has said, “I am truly, madly, deeply in love with movement,” has teamed up with visual artist John Monti for Moat, a sixty-minute site-specific performance taking place in the moat that surrounds historic Fort Jay on Governors Island.

Beth Gill’s Catacomb will be performed in Federal Hall for the River to River Festival (photo by Brian Rogers)

Saturday, June 17, 8:00
Sunday, June 18, 8:00
Monday, June 19, 8:00
Beth Gill: Catacomb, Federal Hall
In May 2016, Bessie Award–winning choreographer Beth Gill presented the site-specific Catacomb at the Chocolate Factory, a dreamlike physical and psychological exploration of what we see and who we are. For River to River, the aching sixty-minute performance moves to historic Federal Hall.

Saturday, June 17, 12 noon – 6:00
Sunday, June 18, 12 noon – 6:00
Saturday, June 24, 12 noon – 6:00
Sunday, June 25, 12 noon – 6:00
The Set-Up: Island Ghost Sleep Princess Time Story Show, the Arts Center at Governors Island
For five years, Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey have been collaborating with men and women from multiple dance disciplines, presenting unique performances that push the boundaries of the movement arts. Their project now culminates in a grand finale on Governors Island, with dance masters I Nyoman Catra (Balinese Topeng), Proeung Chhieng (Cambodian), Junko Fisher (Okinawan), Saya Lei (Mandalay-style, classical Burmese), Jean-Christophe Paré (French baroque), Kapila Venu (Indian Kutiyattam), and Heni Winahyuningsih (Javanese refined) and musicians Jonathan Bepler, Reiko Fueting, and Megan Schubert. “Many dances on an ISLAND, a GHOST of what they were, having lost details during a long SLEEP but nevertheless the PRINCESS of their destiny. This TIME it is one STORY, full of fortuitous meetings, grave errors, and happy misunderstandings. It’s a SHOW, folks!” Cardona and Lacey explain. You can see the complete schedule here.

Monday, June 19, 6:00
Tuesday, June 20, 2:00
Wednesday, June 21, 2:00
Faye Driscoll: Thank You for Coming: Play, Broad and Wall Sts.
At last year’s LMCC Open Studios on Governors Island, the endlessly inventive Faye Driscoll offered a work-in-progress showing of the second part of her participatory “Thank You for Coming” series, which began in 2014 with Thank You for Coming: Attendance Play later moved to the BAM Fisher. She now revisits Play, staging a forty-minute version at the intersection of Broad and Wall Sts.

Tuesday, June 20, 4:00 – 8:00
Night at the Museums
Many Lower Manhattan museums and cultural institutions will stay open late on June 20, offering free entry to historic sites along with special programs. Among the participants are the African Burial Ground National Monument, China Institute, Federal Hall National Memorial, Fraunces Tavern Museum, Museum of American Finance, Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, National Archives at New York City, National Museum of the American Indian, National September 11 Memorial Museum (advance RSVP required), 9/11 Tribute Center, NYC Municipal Archives, Poets House, the Skyscraper Museum, and the South Street Seaport Museum.

Wednesday, June 21, 5:00
Thursday, June 22, 3:00
Friday, June 23, 3:00
Marjani Forté-Saunders: Memoirs of a . . . Unicorn, Melville Gallery, South Street Seaport Museum
Pasadena-born, Harlem based dancer and choreographer Marjani Forté-Saunders, who previously was in the Urban Bush Women Dance Company, brings her solo Memoirs of a . . . Unicorn to the South Street Seaport Museum, a collaboration with media designer Meena Murugesan and sound designer Everett Saunders that relates to the history of Black American magic.

Thursday, June 22, 7:00
Friday, June 23, 7:00
Saturday, June 24, 7:00
Sunday, June 25, 5:00
En Garde Arts: Harbored, Winter Garden, Brookfield Place, 230 Vesey St.
En Garde Arts, which was founded by Anne Hamburger to “catalyze social change” through immersive theater, will stage the sixty-minute site-specific collage play Harbored, about Willa Cather, Lewis & Clark, and Cather’s character Ántonia. The piece, featuring more than fifty performers, is written and directed by Jimmy Maize, with an original score by Heather Christian sung by the Downtown Voices Choir and movement by Wendy Seyb. During the day, you can share your immigration story with them and it just might be incorporated into that night’s show.

Friday, June 23, 6:00
Sunday, June 25, 6:00
Maria Hassabi: Staged? (2016) — undressed, City Hall Park
Last summer, Maria Hassabi presented Movement #2 on the High Line, a dance performed by Simon Courchel, Hristoula Harakas, Molly Lieber, and Oisín Monaghan as people passed by. That morphed into Staged, which ran at the Kitchen in October. Now Hassabi is bringing Staged? (2016) — undressed to City Hall Park, where four dancers will move around Katja Novitskova’s “EARTH POTENTIAL” exhibition.