Imprinting (Dan)space: Tendayi Kuumba and Samita Sinha

Left: Tendayi Kuumba (photo: Angie Vasquez)
Right: Samita Sinha (photo: Aram Jibilian)

A shared evening of new work by Tendayi Kuumba and Samita Sinha
Danspace Project
April 25 and April 27, 2019

collective terrain/s is a collective research process into sounding in the body. How does the body open up possibilities for voice and resistance? What resonances in the voice and body exist beyond language?

 --from Danspace Project

As part of an evening organized by collective terrain/s, composer and vocalist Samita Sinha--with numerous collaborating vocalists of cultural diversity--creates a force field of sonic energy to surround an audience informally positioned at the center, not the perimeter, of the performance space. Infinity Folds is vocal music in motion, a lovely, luscious gift that makes you the focus of a meditative sonic bath and massage, your aura tingling. It's marvelously coordinated as the circle of vocalists shape and move breath--moans and drones, trills and low roars--into the outer air, using softly-adjusted bodies as tuning devices. You absorb the circling and circling soundscape that builds, pulses, overlaps, presses towards listeners and then ebbs, flares in spots, sometimes drops away entirely. Set in the sacred and justice-conscious space of St. Mark's Church, this loving ritual feels and sounds so right. You might never want it to end. [Performed by Regina Bain, Rina Espiritu, Fana Fraser, Yingjia Lemon Guo, Chaesong Kim, Risha Lee, Okwui Okpokwasili, lily bo shapiro, Samita Sinha, Sheena Sood and Helen Yung]

Somewhere in the midst of U.F.O.:(Unidentified Fly Objects), made and performed by Tendayi Kuumba in creative collaboration with Greg Purnell, an intermittent projection flashes against an upper corner of the church's wall. It images a patch of cloudy sky lit up by the glow of lightning. Kuumba's formidably quirky self-presentation gives way to something simply majestic, and you realize: this unpredictable, kinda scary woman is lightning. Folding, writhing, recoiling, she lights up the night with pure energy coursing through every stretch of her without impediment. The piece--accompanied by Purnell, seated at a desk, working a soundboard and providing a strong, rumbling ostinato--also features Kuumba's vocals. In body and voice--and soul--she is jazz.

We already whole, she sings. Even through the rain/somehow we always maintain.

We already home.

Purnell sings with her.

Can't break my soul.

Now hear that!

Choreography: Tendayi Kuumba
Creative concepts, lighting, dramaturgy, set design and songwriting/musical composition created with collaborator Greg Purnell

collective terrain/s is organized by Lydia Bell, Jasmine Hearn and Tatyana Tenenbaum. To learn more about collective terrain/s's activities and the series' publication--designed by collective please--click here.

A shared evening of new work by Tendayi Kuumba and Samita Sinha concludes tomorrow (Saturday) with a performance at 8pm. For the best effects, come a bit early to get a prime seat in the center, though you can also sit along the church's risers. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project

131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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

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Mariana Valencia offers "Bouquet" at The Chocolate Factory

Mariana Valencia (right)
with collaborator Lydia Okrent in Bouquet
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Mariana Valencia
Bouquet
The Chocolate Factory
April 18-27

Created and performed by Mariana Valencia, Bouquet examines authorship within the premise of transmission, relation, alliance and ensemble. Her body is the main archive as she quotes dances by Alvin Ailey, Trisha Brown, Frank Conversano and nia love, as well as Eurhythmics and Garifuna dance forms. Valencia also quotes sections of her old dances that were made with her longtime collaborator Lydia Okrent, who has also artistically directed Bouquet with an attunement to ensemble and reference. Valencia’s choreographic retrospective is partnered with her own body as she moves various objects about the space. A smattering of fake fruits, a net, a large piece of glass and a plinth -to name a few- accompany Valencia as she moves her way through a sound score of origin stories. The sound score is a series of letters that circumnavigate her creative path in New York, weaving also through her adolescence and stories from her early 20s. These reveal a vast range of serious, tender and humorous growing pains that lend her abstract movements a foundation that anchors them to the plurality of creation. Valencia fleshes out these movements, histories and influences, as if this timeline of encounters were the sole reasons for producing any work of art. In Bouquet, Valencia invites the audience to traverse a dense field of collective reference.

-- promotional text for Bouquet

What is it?

First thought as you take your seat inside The Chocolate Factory's performance space and look across the floor at a large, ungainly parcel wrapped in a net and resting on a long white base.

It's oddly shaped, and a gap in the tied net that displays an inner wrapping of pale aqua. There's also something small, squarish, equally mysterious stuck between this aqua surface and the netting.

As you continue glancing across the space, you notice the back wall sports a painting of a vase of flowers. A bouquet is a collection of flowers--a collection of things deliberately chosen for aesthetic effect for yourself or others to savor. By the end of Bouquet, you will understand Valencia sees herself as a bouquet.

She enters suddenly--Hi! Thanks for coming!--a radiant apparition, amusingly modest and yet a little larger than life. The red of her matte lipstick pops as does the metallic cobalt blue of the unitard she wears under dark khaki-tan slacks. She speaks. Her gesticulation--big, sharply delineated gestures--click into place with satisfying assurance even as they remain elusive in meaning. There's charm, a connection with her audience. But, over time, the verbal stream becomes choppy, broken into haltingly-delivered bits--word by word, syllable by syllable, incomprehensible sound by sound--as if, intermittently, she's withdrawing or retrogressing.

But check her face a bit later as she begins to unwrap and unpack her parcel. The singing and speaking voice you hear now is in the air, recorded, maybe comes from where the revealed items come from--the past, the archive.

"The game is on/Give me a call, boo/My love is strong/Gonna give my all to you."

Whatever you've expected the lumpy package to contain, it turns out to hold simple items which Valencia sets out in a clear, pristine arrangement and identifies--"a bandanna, a pillow, a mat...pomegranate, plinth, tempered glass"--without narrative explanation. They are, simply, "some of my favorite objects," and you're wise to accept these talismans as they are.

She does mention that the floral bouquet painting was made by her dad--"a Sunday painter."

A body is a mass of stories, each body unique in its collection. But that emergent individuality continuously circles back into the multiplicity of its sources. So, Valencia gives her all--or, at least, a fair representation of what all might be. And then she leads an exercise that draws the audience into this multiplicity as well. Now you, too--all of you--have joined her ensemble, joined with her voice, become her history and her future.

Made in collaboration with dramaturg Lydia Okrent
Sound: Jules Gimbrone
Lighting: Kathy Kaufmann

Bouquet continues through Saturday, April 27 with Thursday-Saturday performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

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

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Writer Lea Marshall has some questions for Ohad Naharin

Batsheva Dance Company
(photo: Stephanie Berger)

Batsheva Dance Company

Modlin Center for the Arts

University of Richmond

March 23, 2019

Guest reviewer: Lea Marshall

I have questions for Ohad Naharin that I know he won’t answer, since he’s famously reluctant to comment on his work. But I want to ask them anyway. Batsheva Dance Company recently performed his 2018 work Venezuela in Richmond, Virginia, the week before their performance in New York at BAM. The longer I sit with the work, the more questions I have. 

What does it mean when an Israeli choreographer creates a dance titled Venezuela that has nothing, apparently, to do with that country? What does it mean that the piece includes two dancers (both appearing to be white) lipsyncing the song “Dead Wrong,” by American rapper Notorious B.I.G.? And that the rest of the sound score ranged from Gregorian chant to Arabic trap to Rage Against the Machine? And finally, what does it mean for Naharin to present 40 minutes of choreography, and then repeat the exact same choreography--with some casting, lighting and music changes--as the second half of the work?

I don’t have answers to these questions, but the way they stack up points to the privilege of an internationally revered male choreographer choosing from a global menu of artistic elements to support his creative vision. But the name of a country, an American rap song--these elements have specific cultural contexts that beg addressing, or at least noticing, when included in an artist’s work. To pluck them from their contexts solely for dramatic effect feels at best whimsical and, at worst, arrogant. Hasn’t contemporary artistic discourse moved beyond the idea that aesthetic choices can be separated from the sociocultural forces shaping them? Because they can’t be. And choosing to dismiss or ignore those forces reduces powerful ideas to a kind of aesthetic servitude.

Although these concerns have lingered in my mind for weeks now, I want to spend time appreciating the undeniable power of the Batsheva performers. In theater, the phrase “fourth wall” refers to the front edge of the stage as a boundary between performers and audience. Watching these dancers, I became conscious of a fifth wall--the sky above. 

Sometimes the choreography spoke directly upward, as when dancers flung white cloths into the air under stark white light. But more compellingly, the dancers themselves absorbed and reflected the space around and above them through muscles, bones, lungs--through the flash of a neck toward the light; the sailing arc of a foot; the rainbow sweep of a forehead from downward-facing, upward, and over into a backbend.

Batsheva dancers train in a technique called Gaga, which was developed by Naharin over years as he choreographed for and served as artistic director of the company (he has handed over the administrative reins to former dancer Gili Navot and now holds the title House Choreographer). Gaga, according to its website, is “predicated on a deep listening to the body and to physical sensations.” Dancers practice this technique without mirrors to encourage focus on sensation rather than shape or line.

Gaga technique yields performers suffused with a sensual awareness of their own power, who move with luscious, elastic fullness, devouring space at full throttle or shifting with a delicate gesture into complete stillness. Much of the pleasure I found in watching this work derived from the absorbing dynamism of the dancers’ performances.

I did not get to know these dancers as people, or characters. In Venezuela, performers appear to function as ciphers or symbols, their humanity foremost but their individual personhood veiled. I should say gendered humanity, since the costumes of black dresses and shirts/pants implied a cast of men and women who often split off into pairs, almost always of opposite genders. Power dynamics in these couples--often dancing what, though I am not versed in Latin dance forms, appeared to be salsa-inflected steps--and seemed to shift continuously as it did among the entire group. I frequently felt aware, however, of the choreographer’s power over his dancers--sometimes in the extremes of speed or flexion or torque the movement required, and sometimes in the imagery deployed, such as when five women rode men as on horseback, letting their legs drag the floor in a way that made it clear all their weight rested in their crotch as the men crawled slowly downstage and then up again. 

I had leisure to contemplate this section more fully--as with every other section--during the dance’s second half. A primary motif of Venezuela appeared to be repetition. As the same choreography unfolded again in the second half, I grew puzzled, and then, truthfully, annoyed even as I remained engaged. The chance to relish all that movement again--with different inflections of new music, lighting and performers--felt luxurious. It also felt like a bold choice, almost a slap in the face--a feeling amplified by the frontal choreography, the dancers’ direct gazes toward the audience and their interaction with the provocative music choices. And now I’m back where I started, with the same questions, and perhaps that’s just where Naharin wants me to be.

Lea Marshall
(photo courtesy of Lea Marshall)

Guest reviewer Lea Marshall’s writing on dance has appeared in Dance Magazine, Dance Teacher, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She lives in Richmond, Virginia, where she is Associate Chair of the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Dance + Choreography.

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

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Davalois Fearon: dancing for C.J. and so many others

Davalois Fearon wearing a costume from For C.J.

Davalois Fearon Dance
For C.J.
BAAD!
March 29-30

When dance artist Davalois Fearon lost her nephew to asthma, she turned mourning into action. Her work, For C.J., represents a cry against the dire health outcomes for communities--predominantly, Black and Latinx people--doubly-impacted by urban pollution and inadequate health care. Fearon, a Jamaican immigrant who grew up in the Bronx, created The For C.J. Initiative to raise awareness and spur city policymakers to address these life-threatening conditions. But she also created a dance to honor her nephew, set to music played live at BAAD! by her husband, composer Mike McGinnis (wood winds), Elias Bailey (tuba) and Jeff Hermanson (trumpet). For C.J.'s resolute symbolism even carries over into instrumentation which requires expert and sustained use of breath.

Without careful reading of Fearon's program notes, it might be tricky to figure out at first look, but her performers represent not only an asthma victim (Mikaila Ware) but also the engulfing forces of her doom (Morgan Anderson, as the medical system, and Njeri Rutherford as the environment). The minute you grasp it, though, the symbolism feels heavy and obvious. All three are dressed in extraordinary wearable art--like hair-coverings made of whole and broken plastic hair rollers--and glittery makeup, blurring distinctions between high and low, pretty and poisonous. The set, unusual costuming give the work the heightened aura of tribal ritual.

The audience gets drawn in, too. Before the piece begins, we're invited to inscribe the names of deceased loved ones on cut-out leaves and tie the stems to ropes that play a significant part in this dance. Those leaves, then, will accumulate and remain for all future performances of the piece.

Like the visual display--including Ware's grotesque, bulbous headdress constructed of something mysterious and, frankly, nauseating--choreography alternates oddity with poignancy. We end with the vision of Ware's body folded forward in yoga's child's pose, covered in a glittery, earth-dark wrapping that now kills her.

To lift the energy, then, the choreographer and her dancers return to celebrate the life and spirit C.J. with the exuberance I remember of forceful, high-flying Fearon dancing for choreographer Stephen Petronio.

Concept, choreography and artistic direction: Davalois Fearon
Collaborating dancers: Morgan Anderson, Njeri Rutherford and Mikaila Ware
Costumes, wearable sculptures and makeup: Jasmine Murrell
Set Design: Myssi Robinson

For C.J. concludes this evening with an 8pm performance. For information, click here and scroll down.

BAAD!
2474 Westchester Avenue, The Bronx
(map/directions)

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

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Nicky Paraiso: ready at La MaMa

Nicky Paraiso (right) with dancer Paz Tanjuaquio
in now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories

Nicky Paraiso
now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories
Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa
March 22-April 7

Nicky Paraiso's performance memoir, now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories, directed by John Jesurun, runs about 80 minutes. A densely-packed, non-stop monologue, it is augmented, surrounded--and, more or less, supported--by scenic design, music, movement and the occasional verbal exchange with his dancing collaborators. It traces Paraiso's Queens boyhood in a Filipino immigrant family through an illustrious, four-decade career in theater, music and curation to the present day. These "intimate histories" of the verbal kind take the lion's share of space and oxygen--although the projections on the scrim dividing one half of the audience from the other can be as enchanting as Paraiso's piano playing and singing.

I question the choice of engaging four star dancers of downtown renown--Irene Hultman, Jon Kinzel, Vicky Shick an Paz Tanjuaquio--if, while relating nearly every life and career detail of your own with a biographer's specificity, you keep these fine artists largely marginalized until nearly the end. I enjoy seeing these performers wherever they land, but why here for what adds up to so little?

Their movement patterns never achieve the impact of Paraiso's heartfelt reenactment of singing "Into The Mystic"--one of my own soul songs--at a lover's memorial. They can't match his remembrance of how the late La MaMa, Ellen Stewart, loved to proudly flash her melon-like breasts and how she admonished him that "you like those talky, talky plays. That's not La MaMa, baby!" And how she added, "You do whatever you want, but I don't gotta like it!"

Talky, talky, indeed.

now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories requires some patience, but the rewards are real. Go, if you want to learn what made Paraiso Paraiso. He is beloved by our downtown arts community and one of the most knowledgeable, diligent and gracious advocates for artists everywhere.

Written by Nicky Paraiso
Direction by John Jesurun
Created in collaboration with performers Irene Hultman, Jon Kinzel, Vicky Shick and Paz Tanjuaquio
Dramaturgy/Script Development: Irene Hultman, George Emilio Sanchez and John Jesurun
Production Management by Caleb Hammond
Costume Design: Gabriel Berry
Lighting Design: Joe Levasseur

now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories continues through Sunday, April 7. For schedule information and tickets, click here.

Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa
66 East 4th Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenues), Manhattan

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

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Ballet Hispánico: all that and a stack of bowlers

From top: Bennyroyce Royon, Edwaard Liang
and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa

Ballet Hispánico
Works by Edwaard Liang, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and Bennyroyce Royon
The Joyce Theater
March 26-31

The women of Ballet Hispánico
and their Magritte-inspired bowlers
in a work by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa
(photo: Paula Lobo)

For this Joyce Theater season, Ballet Hispánico bookends a cheeky, all-female performance of Annabelle Lopez Ochoa's Magritte-inspired Sombrerísimo--a 2013 work made for men--with world premieres by two Asian-American dancemakers. With El Viaje, Taiwan-born Edwaard Liang has gifted this ensemble with a meditation on immigration and the journey towards love, community and hope. What's the connection to this troupe's Latinx profile? Literally, the historic migration of a Chinese diaspora to the shores of Cuba; yet, beyond that specific backstory, the work--lucid and moving--will prove accessible to anyone with a heart. For music, Liang selected Academy of St. Martin in the Fields's sublime recording of Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis--a performance that has always given me chills. With designers Danielle Truss (costumes) and Joshua Paul Weckesser (lighting), he has turned the Joyce stage into a jewel box displaying every elegantly-sculpted facet of individual movement, partnership and grouping. The dancers are profoundly supple and expressive. One cannot help but get swept up in the energy of Liang's searching and threshing of stage space.

Bennyroyce Royon's gift to Ballet Hispánico draws upon his Filipino heritage and his culture's Spanish/Asian intersection. As in El Viaje, but without the exalted poetics of Liang's dancemaking, Homebound/Alaala, suggests a variety of interpersonal relationships and environments in flux and in possibilities. This robust ensemble will be remembered most for a colorful, cleverly adaptable set design of large boxes developed, in collaboration, by Amanda Gladu and Royon. Continuously rearranged and re-purposed by the dancers, the boxes aid in the telling of stories of leave-taking and travel, of containers holding history and identity, of erecting and dismantling barriers between people.

Ballet Hispánico continues at The Joyce through Sunday, March 31. For schedule information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (at 19th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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SPECIAL EVENT:

I'm also excited to announce that Eduardo Vilaro (Ballet Hispánico's Artistic Director and CEO) will join choreographer Bennyroyce Royon for a conversation and screening of excerpts from Homebound/Alaala at Gibney on Wednesday, April 17, 6:30-8pm.

This Sorry I Missed Your Show program is free, but seating is limited. So, please RSVP soon. Learn more here.

Gibney
280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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

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Okpokwasili and Born's "Adaku's Revolt"

Okwui Okpokwasili
(photo: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)

Adaku's Revolt
Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born
Abrons Arts Center
March 14-24

One young black girl becomes alert to her inner signals, finds the strength to resist expectations, and revolts against efforts to straighten her hair. -- from Abrons Arts Center's website

Out of the blue, a thought visited me over breakfast today:

No, you can't touch my hair. My hair is part of my body. I do not give you permission to touch my body. So, why do you think you can touch my hair?

I'd swear I don't know where that came from, but I do know it's something I should have said, years ago, to one man--the husband of a fellow dance critic--whose white hand shot out and touched my woolly head. Happened so fast, I didn't have time to cringe, flinch or launch a preemptive strike, which I now so wish I had done.

And I also know Okwui Okpokwasili (with director/designer Peter Born) must have triggered something with a new ensemble work, Adaku's Revolt, just opened at Abrons Arts Center. It's not about white people touching Black people's hair, the site of both painful and glorious historical experience and culture. But it is about how white aesthetics touch Black people's hair...and bodies...and values...and lives.

Dear Okwui, as you must imagine, I know all about the perils of getting the "kitchen" straightened with a hot comb. I think you must have reached out and touched a nerve.

Urban Bush Women's dancers are also looking at the Black hair thing this season with Hair & Other Stories. But Okpokwasili's concept and Born's visual design appear to have the potential to help Adaku's Revolt work down into the subconscious in a way that UBW's far more direct piece--with audience participation that keeps our conscious minds centered and on high alert--might not.

Above: Dancer AJ Wilmore as Adaku
Below: Wilmore with Okwui Okpokwasili
(photos: Ian Douglas)

The audience is directed to its place on the stage of Abrons's theater through a back channel and instructed to take seats lining three sides of the performance space. As we enter and get settled, the scene has already been set, a compelling visual atmosphere already built. Before a white screen, four dancers lie on the floor with torsos stiffly arched and heads thrown back. Above them, a large windsock of pearly-white gossamer continuously flows out from a big fan, its hypnotizing, watery fabric reaching for another dancer, our Adaku (AJ Wilmore), who writhes, wriggles, tilts, chops and revs up as she sits in a chair. A dense assemblage of what appear to be ordinary desk lamps lights the area.

Within Born's vision, Okpokwasili's placement and movement of individual and group bodies take the shape of dreams with nonlinear but soul-tugging storytelling. White fabric engulfing and molding itself across faces. Bodies emerging from beneath pulsating fabric. Hips and feet twisting, pelvises rocking and left hands raised high in the air over a captivating--and destabilizing--polyrhythm of music and women's voice-overs and live singing.

I tried to jot down something Wilmore said before her turbulent yet mutually-supportive duet with Okpokwasili, and I think I got it right:

I'm going to open all the doors in my head.

Doors opening bring music and voices--both louder, brighter, undeniable--and the birth-like reclamation of bodies. I think the piece, just under an hour, seemed longer. For me, its conclusion fell short of grace or definitude. But something about it all clearly reminded me to revolt.

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Choreographed and created in collaboration with Peter Born and performers Khadidiatou Bangoura, Peter Born, Audrey Hailes, Breyanna Maples and AJ Wilmore

Adaku's Revolt runs through March 24 with performances at various times. For information and tickets, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(directions)


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

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