BODY AND SOUL: Heather Robles: Reclaiming aliveness

Heather Robles (photo: AK47 Division)

In this headshot of Heather, she smiles while facing the camera, her brown hair pulled back in a bun, while wearing red lipstick, red dangly earrings, and a black suit jacket with white shirt underneath.

Heather Robles gently beckons us out of the numbness we might have slipped into as the world feels so hard right now. What do we desire and how can desire and curiosity awaken and guide us forward towards joy?

You'll notice this episode has no background music. I didn't need or want that sound to cover Frijolito's snoring!

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN!

Heather Robles (photo: by Keith A Manning)

Black and white photo shows Heather in a full body position back arched up, arms above head and hands furled like a plant about to unfold, her legs standing with one knee bent and foot forced arch. She is in front of a window with city lights showing through, the floor wooden. She is wearing a long asymmetrical sleeveless top and black leggings while barefoot.

Heather Robles is a nondisabled queer Latinx cis woman of Indigenous Mexican descent who lives on the stolen land of the Lenape and Canarsie peoples in what is colonially called Brooklyn. She is Founder and Artistic Executive Director of Alma Dance Company. As a choreographer and performer, she has worked with many artists including Yvonne Rainer, Sidra Bell, Pavel Zuštiak, Nathan Trice, DANCENOISE, André M. Zachery, Buglisi Dance Theater, Fredrick Earl Mosley, Suzzanne Ponomarenko Dance, The Equus Projects. She is also the Executive Director of the New York Dance and Performance Awards, The Bessies, and a certified birth doula at Our Birth Doula. Heather is also a dance educator, teaching artist, producer, and advocate for mental health in the dance field. https://www.almadanceco.com

Performer Kayla Farrish receives a 2022 Bessie!

Kayla Farrish

  

Big, big congrats to Kayla Farrish, Bessie recipient for Outstanding Performer!

Kayla Farrish in December 8th by Kayla Farrish in collaboration with Belinda McGuire, the Eva Yaa Asantewaa Solo for Solo Showing at Gibney

"For a tumble and waterfall of physicality and phrasing that at times takes one’s breath away, and at times quickens the blood. Farrish is in full control from start to finish, and is also able to offer vulnerability and heart through her performance."

The Bessies! 2022 New York Dance and Performance Awards

null 

 

Soledad Barrio with Antonio Granjero (photo: Jesse Rodkin)

Nai-Ni Chen in Truth Bound (photo: Sylvia Chiang)

 

New York, NY (December 16, 2022) – The NY Dance and Performance Awards, the Bessies, New York City’s premier dance awards honoring outstanding creative work in the field, announced tonight the 2022 award recipients at the 38th annual Bessie Awards. Porshia A. Derival, Executive Director of H+ | TOTEM Productions, hosted this year’s event, which was held at Chelsea Factory. A complete list of the 2022 awards follows below.

Derival welcomed artists and supporters of the New York dance community who gathered to celebrate the nominees and awardees. Bessie Awards were presented to artists for outstanding choreographer/creator, performer, sound design/music composition, visual design, outstanding revival, and breakout choreographer—an award that honors an artist who has made an exceptional leap in their career this past year. All of the awardees and nominated artists in these categories received a $500 honorarium, courtesy of a grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Tatiana Desardouin was honored with the 2022 Juried Bessie Award, which recognizes a choreographer who exhibits some of the most interesting and exciting ideas in dance in New York City today, and whose work deserves to be seen more outside the city. The award comes with touring support and other engagement opportunities from New York State DanceForce. The 2022 Bessies Jury of three acclaimed choreographers, LaTasha Barnes, Molissa Fenley, and Abby Zbikowski, selected Desardouin.

Emily L. Waters, a senior program associate in the Arts and Culture program at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was honored with the 2022 Bessies Angel Award for her leadership and advocacy on behalf of dance.

Two previously announced awards were also presented. Choreographer and dancer Nai-Ni Chen was posthumously honored with the 2022 Lifetime Achievement in Dance Award. Christine Jowers, founding editor of The Dance Enthusiast, received the 2022 Award for Service to the Field of Dance.

The ceremony featured a performance of Nai-Ni Chen’s stunning Crosscurrent, performed by Rio Kikuchi and Esteban Santamaria. The evening also included an exhilarating pop-up performance by Passion Fruit Dance Company’s Tatiana Desardouin, with Mai Lê Hô, Lauriane Ogay, and Gyeun "Lobel" Jeong.

The Bessies also honored members of the dance community who passed away since the last Bessies ceremony. The In Memoriam section was presented by Sangeeta Ghosh Yesley and Paz Tanjuaquio.

Other presenters included Abdiel, Marija Abney, Michele Byrd-McPhee, PeiJu Chien-Pott, Natsha Diggs, maura nguyen donohue, Brinda Guha, Anabella Lenzu, Kyle Marshall, Nicky Paraiso, Tiffany Rea-Fisher, george emilio sanchez, Lucy Sexton, Philip Treviño, and André M. Zachery.

The 38th annual Bessie Awards was produced by H+ | TOTEM Productions.

THE 2022 NY DANCE AND PERFORMANCE AWARD RECIPIENTS AND CITATIONS: 

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT IN DANCE AWARD

 

Nai-Ni Chen

Nai-Ni Chen was a force in the dance community with her unique choreographic body of work that fuses Eastern cultural forms of Chinese dance and the Western world of modern dance. Her vision of the immigrant’s journey of crossing cultures and adapting to a new home provided endless inspirations and opportunities for creative expressions that enrich the human experience.

 

SERVICE TO THE FIELD OF DANCE AWARD

 

Christine Jowers

Jowers is an example of generosity, dedication, and commitment in service to the dance field. After her career as a dancer performing in England and the U.S., Jowers devoted herself to supporting dance artists, to writing about them with respect, truth, and love. In times when dance reviews and writers are almost extinct, when publications and dance journalists are disappearing, Jowers and The Dance Enthusiast value and care about dance criticism and documenting performances. She has and continues to ignite the dance community with passion, curiosity, and conversation.

BESSIES ANGEL AWARD

 

Emily L. Waters

Waters is being recognized for her advocacy of dance in times when artists need it the most; for ensuring dance is brought to the table as a former professional dancer; for being a trailblazer for dance in the philanthropic setting. 

OUTSTANDING CHOREOGRAPHER/CREATOR

 

Leslie Cuyjet

Blur at Open Call at The Shed

Intimate, vulnerable, bold, and enigmatic, this visceral piece is a quiet merging of Cuyjet’s inner worlds. With sequences of highly orchestrated, improvised structures that are exacting, charged, and in the present, Cuyjet creates a vast, living landscape.

 

Bill T. Jones, Janet Wong, and Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company

Deep Blue Sea at Park Avenue Armory

For a visionary, large-scale work incorporating around 100 dancers and a nontraditional use of space and production elements, culminating in a creation both universal and deeply personal.

 

Anna Sperber

Bow Echo, presented by XØ Projects Inc and The Old American Can Factory

With keen attention to detail in choreographic structures that relate to the environment, Sperber creates a visual, exciting rooftop ritual with movement invention and materials that break the conventional expectations of an audience.

 

Raúl Tamez

Migrant Mother for Limón Dance Company at The Joyce Theater

For creating a tributary piece to the immense grief and emotional pain that migrant mothers endure. From technically complex choreography, using space and bodies to sculpt eye-catching negative and positive space, to the blended use of modern-day sound bites with music, this is a deeply somatic experience.

OUTSTANDING PERFORMER

 

Soledad Barrio

in Soledad Barrio & Noche Flamenca at The Joyce Theater

For stamping the fire and passion of flamenco into the heart of the observer, making everyone want to be from Spain. Barrio’s blended precision, rhythm, and expressiveness do not just move with the music, but sing back to it.

Kayla Farrish

 

Kayla Farrish

in December 8th by Kayla Farrish in collaboration with Belinda McGuire, the Eva Yaa Asantewaa Solo for Solo Showing at Gibney

For a tumble and waterfall of physicality and phrasing that at times takes one’s breath away, and at times quickens the blood. Farrish is in full control from start to finish, and is also able to offer vulnerability and heart through her performance.

 

Nikolai McKenzie Ben Rema

in A Jamaican Battyboy in America by Arthur Avilés at Hemispheric Institute at NYU and  BAAD!

For interpreting and adding to a revival with precision, poise, and evident generosity of spirit. McKenzie Ben Rema becomes at once a channel and a generating vessel with bold and mesmerizing dancing.

 

Antonio Ramos

in Puro Teatro by luciana achugar at The Chocolate Factory Theater

Ramos embraces achugar’s choreographic vision to create a living landscape where bodies are in the present, joyful, courageous, vulnerable, funny, connecting, and intersecting with one another. Ramos’s movements of improvised structures are exacting, highly-skilled, charged, and playful.

 

OUTSTANDING REVIVAL 

 

Set and Reset/Reset (2021)

Choreographed and co-directed by Abigail Yager, co-directed by Jamie Scott with assistance from Diane Madden, performed by Candoco Dance Company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music 

For a dynamic, fully embodied vision/revision of Trisha Brown’s Set and Reset (1983). Candoco dancers fully speak Brown’s vocabulary while also creating new ways to speak. With the fabric Brown laid out for them, the dancers create a vibrant tapestry that shimmers and moves with fluidity and grace. Beautiful and moving, the dancers leave the audience with much to rethink.

OUTSTANDING SOUND DESIGN / MUSIC COMPOSITION

 

Marc Álvarez (arrangement)

For Carmen by Johan Inger, performed by Compañía Nacional de Danza at The Joyce Theater

For remixing music using Bizet’s original composition with a contemporary twist. There is a seamless transition from classical to contemporary that makes the music one.

 

OUTSTANDING VISUAL DESIGN

 

New Affiliates (Set and Costume Design) – Ivi Diamantopoulou, Jaffer Kolb, and Rashaad Newsome Studio with Truman T. Brown Jr., Howie B., Kimberly Jones, and Randy Rosenthal

For Assembly by Rashaad Newsome at Park Avenue Armory

For an exciting multi-arts spectacle, a true celebration of African culture disseminated into current society supporting dance, music, and poetry through textiles and visual art. An impressive amalgamation of unsuspecting elements making a unified whole.

 

Princess Lockerooo (photo: Ben Hider)

  OUTSTANDING BREAKOUT CHOREOGRAPHER

 

Princess Lockerooo

For artistry that moves the audience from spectator to fellow performer quite seamlessly, teaching about dance culture in the process. Princess Lockeroo is a multifaceted artist who has always been fully dedicated to her craft and does not miss any details in creating a full, immersive experience for her audience.

 

2022 JURIED BESSIE AWARD

 

Tatiana Desardouin

Desardouin’s “groove,” embraces the relationship of time with an individual’s true nature. Each moment becomes fully realized and progresses forward to reveal the dancer's authentic self. Just as her “Passion Fruit Seeds” provide a sourceable root for individuals to create and sustain, she and her works are a galvanized source of inspiration and dopeness for the Street and Club dance community and everyone she encounters.

 

ABOUT THE BESSIES

The NY Dance and Performance Awards have saluted outstanding and groundbreaking creative work in the dance field in New York City for 38 years. Known as “The Bessies” in honor of the late revered dance teacher Bessie Schönberg, the awards were established in 1984 by David R. White at Dance Theater Workshop. They recognize outstanding work in choreography, performance, sound design/music composition, and visual design. Nominees are chosen by a selection committee composed of artists, presenters, producers, and writers. All those working in the dance field are invited to join the Bessies Membership as members and participate in annual discussions on the direction of the awards and nominate individuals to serve on the selection committee. For more information about The Bessies, visit www.bessies.org.         

The 2021–2022 Bessie Awards Selection Committee: Ronald K. Alexander, Maria Baranova Suzuki, Maria Bauman, Charles Vincent Burwell, Yvonne H. Chow, Yoshiko Chuma, Sangeeta Ghosh Yesley, Valerie Green, Anabella Lenzu, Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte, Tiffany Rea-Fisher, Elgie Gaynell Sherrod, Ivan Talijančić, and Philip Treviño.

The Bessies Steering Committee: Yvonne H. Chow, Stanford Makishi, maura nguyen donohue, Nicky Paraiso, Carla Peterson, Craig Peterson, Tiffany Rea-Fisher, george emilio sanchez, Paz Tanjuaquio (chair), Laurie Uprichard, and Charmaine Warren.

My Curatorial Highlights of 2020

 

 CURATORIAL HIGHLIGHTS 2020

I call on all Black creatives to preserve and tell our own stories.

We must center, treasure and tell our own stories, or others will tell them their own way for their own uses--or refuse to tell them at all.

The comprehensive story of Calendar Year 2020 is a difficult one, and there are different ways I could tell it. This day, though, I wish to acknowledge and celebrate things achieved before and, then, in spite of the pandemic. Things accomplished before and, then, in response to the rise of this year’s anti-racism uprising. Things created in joy and, then, in sorrow, in an effort to keep at least some movement happening at a time of stasis and loss and to build circles of mutual support.


GIBNEY CURATION

Below is just a sample of notable events I curated for the Gibney organization during 2020:

Black Dance Artists on Masculinity, panel moderated by J. Bouey and featuring Du’Bois A’Keen, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Orlando Hunter, Jr. and Ricarrdo Valentine

Soundz at the Back of My Head, premiered by Thomas F. DeFrantz/Slippage, Bessie Award nominee (Quran Karriem) for Outstanding Sound Design/Musical Composition

Afro/Solo/Man, premiered by Brother(hood) Dance! (Orlando Hunter, Jr. and Ricarrdo Valentine), Bessie Award nominee for Outstanding Production and for Outstanding Visual Design (video)

Digital: Unidentified Fly Object (U.F.O) by Tendayi Kuumba with Greg Purnell

Long Tables: Latina/x in Dance and Performance (Alicia Diaz, Mariana Valencia, Yanira Castro, Larissa Velez-Jackson, Beatrice Capote) and Does Dance Matter to America?
(Danni Gee, Brinda Guha, Joya Powell, Ayodele Casel, Maura Nguyen Donohue, Aynsley Vandenbroucke)

Art + Action Artist Talks: Solo for Solo Artists, moderated by myself and featuring Marion Spencer, Darrin Wright, Zui Gomez, Wendell Gray III and Paul Hamilton. Spirituality of the Body, moderated by Charmaine Warren and featuring Laurel Atwell, Shamar Wayne Watt, Ogemdi Ude, and iele paloumpis

Sorry I Missed Your Show: presentations by Tess Dworman, 2020 Bessie Award nominee for Breakout Choreographer; LaJuné MacMillian; Michelle Boulé; Jennifer Nugent; Stefanie Batten Bland

Living Gallery: word-based performances by Linda La Beija; Nia Witherspoon; Melanie Greene; Kayhan Irani; Oceana James

Some of the many artists I met with during this year for consultations or discussions about developing work have included Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Leyya Tawil, zavé martohardjono, Kayla Farrish, Dohee Lee, mayfield brooks, Audre Wirtanen, Colleen Thomas, Olaiya Olayemi, Ahn Vo, Kazu Kumagai and Lisa LaTouche.


CURATING DANCING QUEERLY FESTIVAL

I was delighted to be recommended to the producers of Boston’s annual Dancing Queerly Festival to guest curate a digital evening of video works from New York-based LGBTQ artists. I selected J. Bouey, Ni’Ja Whitson, Maria Bauman-Morales, zavé martohardjono and Brother(hood) Dance! for this well-received program.

In years past, I have also enjoyed curating events for Danspace Project, La MaMa and 92Y Harkness. I'm still eager for independent curatorial or dramaturgical projects--specifically Black- or BIPOC-centered ones. Reach out!

CREATING BLACK DIASPORA

This summer, I started organizing Black Diaspora, my pilot program designed for rising Black artists from a variety of cultural backgrounds and dance/performance techniques and traditions. I invited artists to apply following recommendations from more experienced Black artists in New York's community, and a cohort of eighteen was formed. Since September, sponsored by Gibney, they have met by Zoom to hold conversations on topics of their own choosing. Some of these informal community conversations have been joined by invited artists such as Ayodele Casel, J. Bouey, Jerron Herman, Kayla Hamilton, Ni'Ja Whitson, Raja Feather Kelly and Rokafella and Kwikstep and more are coming in 2021. Participation is free. Recently, I was offered additional funding to curate a series of workshops for the Black Diaspora cohort. These will run from February through June of 2021, facilitated by Cynthia Oliver, Gilbert T. Small II, Paloma McGregor, Nicole Stanton and Bebe Miller. I have invited this first cohort to return for a second fiscal year (September 2021 through June 2022). It is my intention to develop Black Diaspora into a full-featured residency program over the next few years.


LAUNCHING IMAGINING: A GIBNEY JOURNAL

Along with its newly-redesigned website, Gibney now has a bi-monthly online journal--Imagining: A Gibney Journal--which I have edited along with outgoing Curatorial and Editorial Coordinator Dani Cole. (Monica Nyenkan has now joined Gibney in the CEC role and has begun assisting me with Imagining.) Some of the writers engaged in our September and November 2020 issues were Ogemdi Ude, George Emilio Sanchez, Maura Nguyen Donohue, Conrhonda E. Baker and Aynsley Vandenbroucke. We are situated at the intersection of the arts and social justice and seek to make space for underrepresented voices.

CREATING/CURATING THE EVA YAA ASANTEWAA BLACK ARTS LEADERSHIP AWARD (EYABALA)

I have awarded the EYABALA space grant at Gibney--funded through a generous contribution from board member Andrew A. Davis--to nia love, Jerron Herman, David Thomson, and Jordan Demetrius Lloyd. These artists will receive 50 hours of free rehearsal space when studios in both of Gibney’s centers can safely reopen. (UPDATE: Due to an unforeseen scheduling conflict, Jerron Herman had to withdraw from this program. André Zachery has been given this award in his place. And, last but not least, the hours have been increased for all awardees from 50 to a whopping 100!)


ADDITIONAL ACTIVITIES

In November, I convened a new independent group Black Curators in Dance and Performance, two-dozen strong, with a focus on mutual support, creative collaboration and advocacy. We have set January 22 for our third meeting.

The independent Artists and Advocates of Color Collective (AACCollective), which I proposed as a haven and support for BIPOC artists affiliated in any way with Gibney, finally began to take off this year, growing in membership and activity.

I have also had the honor of serving on the 2020 Bessie Awards Steering Committee for a short spell this year and joined some amazing community leaders on the advisory Dance/NYC Symposium Committee in preparation for the upcoming symposium (March 17-19, 2021).


Most of our journeys have been disrupted this year, and I have had to put aside or alter many things planned for this year and the next. But I’m happy to say 2020 still offered good opportunities to stay in motion and strive to make a difference.

Wishing you and yours all the best in 2021!

Eva

******

DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve, at Gibney, as Senior Director of Artist Development and Curation and Editorial Director. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

******

Subscribe in a reader