River to River 2024
In 2024, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels is supporting the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for the presentation of the 23rd annual River To River Festival.
This year’s River To River Festival aligns with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s 50th anniversary celebrations. In honor of this milestone, the 2024 festival features LMCC residency and grants alumni from the Extended Life program working across disciplines, with a captivating array of dance, music, video, installation, and exhibitions that reflects the interdisciplinary, diverse ethos of LMCC.
Miguel Gutierrez
THE POWER OF THE BOUNCE
Participatory Performance
June 7, 5pm
28 Liberty
Miguel Gutierrez presents an interactive, high-energy dance performance complete with group choreography, aerobics, and costumes. Come in costume and learn the famous “Aerobicon” dance that Miguel created to Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon” in 2000. Way before TikTok, this dance was a viral hit in the early days of YouTube that was then recreated by people all over the world in duos, small groups, and giant crowds. Miguel will revive this dance and create a powerful public spectacle reminiscent of the cardiovascularly challenging and spiritually charged but now defunct DEEP AEROBICS technique that he taught and disseminated for ten years. This participatory spectacle questions how we keep moving amidst the chaos of everyday life exuberant joy, and systemic injustice.
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
The (chrysalis) Archives
Exhibition
June 7-9, June 14 & 16, 21-23, 12-5pm – June 15, 2-7pm
The Arts Center at Governors Island, Lower Gallery
Performance Activation
June 9, 6pm
The Arts Center at Governors Island, Lower Gallery
Multidisciplinary artist jaamil olawale kosoko presents an exhibition incorporating video installation, photographic imagery, sculpture, and performance in the Lower Gallery at The Arts Center at Governors Island as part of their evolving visual performance practice that combines Black and queer theoretical, literary and spiritual lineages with biographical and bodily knowledge. The exhibition will incorporate past works including the film Chameleon (A Visual Album), three-channel video and installation Syllabus for Black Love, as well as photo and documentation of past performances. The multi-media installation will include a performance activation titled (chrysalis: activation 1) -a hybrid media performance work that integrates sculpture, moving image, original poetry, and emergent choreographic strategies prompted by the audience. The work examines concepts of metamorphosis, intergenerational knowledge, blood memory, negative space, and the environmental grief that lingers in the aftermath of the living gesture.
Jesi Cook
Whole body in my ear
Performance
June 8, 1pm, 4pm
The Arts Center at Governors Island, Upper Gallery
Whole body in my ear is a performance in which sound and body emerge as one fluid and dynamic textural form. The work sees performers splice and patch text, movement, and sound scores in creating new languages and porous realities. This endurance-based auditory fantasy pushes toward dissonance, using it as a means to explore and amplify otherness. The scores build, heighten, and erode an ouroboric circuit—with patterns repeating, leaking, and breaking apart throughout a shifting sculptural landscape.
Nattie Trogdon + Hollis Bartlett
Fallacies
Performance
June 8 & 9, 7pm
Rockefeller Park, South Meadow - Battery Park City
Workshop
June 9, 5pm
Rockefeller Park, South Meadow - Battery Park City
Fallacies blurs the lines between original source and personal interpretation, constructing dance from a dancer’s perspective. Distorting referential choreography to reveal new patterns and physical possibilities, the piece materializes as a Rorschach test of dance. When the movement is stripped down, what do you see? By rendering movement through the lens of its performers, Fallacies makes invisible embodied histories visible.
In addition to performances June 8 and 9, audiences are invited to join a workshop with Nattie Trogdon + Hollis Bartlett at 5pm on Sunday, June 9 to learn movement from Fallacies, gaining insight into the piece's various original sources before seeing the performance that evening.
NIC Kay
lil BLK
Performance
June 13, 7pm
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
June 14, 7:30pm
The Monster Ba
lil BLK invites you into a deeply personal exploration of Black and queer identity through the lens of NIC Kay’s lived experiences. This live experimental solo performance delves into moments of pain, loss, and the quest for healing. Set against the backdrop of a twenty-year shift in public attitudes to the LGBTQ community, everchanging queer cultures, and the evolving and reimagined landscape of the dancefloor–NIC Kay’s narrative unfolds with raw honesty and vulnerability, inviting reflection and connection with the audience. Prepare to be immersed in a journey that is equal parts intimate, thought-provoking, and deeply human.
Kayla Hamilton and Kate Speer
PlaceHolder
Installation
June 15, 2-7pm
June 16 + 21-23, 12-5pm
The Arts Center at Governors Island, Cafe
Installation Activation
June 14, 4pm
The Arts Center at Governors Island, Cafe
Kayla Hamilton and Kate Speer share an installation in dialogue with their performance project PlaceHolder–a collaboratively made experience that exposes how perception actualizes and strips identities. The installation will take up the themes of the performance project (presented through a series of private, intimate gatherings), which asks guests to consider the ways they meet, engage and “see” others. The installation draws attention to perception and perspective and the frequent disconnect between how we want to be perceived and how outside forces (people, society, strangers) impact perception.
Mayfield Brooks
whale fall reckoning
Installation
June 15, 2-9pm
June 16, 12-5pm
June 21, 12-5pm
June 22, 12-9pm
June 23, 12-5pm
The Arts Center at Governors Island, Upper Gallery
Installation Activation
June 15, 7pm
The Arts Center at Governors Island, Upper Gallery
Mayfield Brooks
whale fall abyss
Performance
June 19-22, 7pm
Tall Ship Wavertree at the South Street Seaport Museum
Choreographer Mayfield Brooks presents two works–whale fall abyss in the cargo hold of the Tall Ship Wavertree, calling up ghosts and ancestors from the intersecting histories of whalers and slave ships, and whale fall reckoning in the Upper Gallery of The Arts Center at Governors Island. Using found objects, sound, light, movement and projection, brooks conjures an abyssal underwater world that transforms the formerly munitions storage warehouse into an imagined site of the decomposed whale.
Samita Sinha
Tremor
Performance
June 20, 8pm
Federal Hall
This special iteration of Samita Sinha’s Tremor is performed in duet with Cecilia Vicuña. Presented in the resonant space of Federal Hall, Sinha and Vicuña infuse their vibrations and lineages into the dense history and monumentality of the site, opening other ways of sensing, knowing, being, and being together. Their vocalizations are spatialized live by sound designer Daniel Neumann, within a visual design by architect Sunil Bald.
Leslie Cuyjet
THICK WAKE
Installation
June 20-22, 8-10:30pm
Black Gotham Experience
Leslie Cuyjet examines systemic barriers for Black access to swimming amidst her own upbringing with swim lessons and competitions, in a new video installation. Layered projections of a silhouetted swimmer mimic the comfort of being submerged and ask audiences to reflect, witness and consider place, history and privilege.
About the partner
Festival River To River
In 2024, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels is supporting the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for the presentation of the 23rd annual River To River Festival.
