now is now (2014)

Gibney DoublePlus Festival
Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center
New York, NY
December 17-20, 2014 (premiere)

Description
now is now is a new work exploring the potential of a single moment to comprise countless layers of ambivalent emotions, contradictory thoughts, and conflicting circumstances. Together we examine how our experiences of our world, our lives, and our bodies emerge endlessly from states of irresolvable dissonance. When personal and global conflict become ways of life, how must we inhabit innumerable states of being simply in order to be?

Curator & Mentor Bebe Miller
Created by Maree ReMalia in collaboration with the artists and performers
Performers Taylor Knight and Anna Thompson
Sound Design slowdanger
Dramaturge Michael J. Morris
Costume Styling Michael J. Morris and Maree ReMalia
Lighting Design Mandy Ringger
Photo Documentation Alex Escalante and Lishay Shechter
Photo Documentation WIP Showing Mario Ashkar Film
Video Documentation Quentin Burley
Trailer David Bernabo

This work was commissioned by the DoublePlus Series, which embraces the artist-as-curator format to present twelve emerging and under-exposed artists as part of Gibney Dance’s inaugural presenting season at 280 Broadway. The six-week series features cutting-edge performance curated by mentor-choreographers Annie-B Parson, RoseAnne Spradlin, Jon Kinzel, Miguel Gutierrez, Bebe Miller, and Donna Uchizono. Special thank you to Bebe Miller for inviting Abby Zbikowski and me to share a bill.

“ReMalia’s performers Taylor Knight and Anna Thompson are part of a sound/performance duo called slowdanger. In now is now she has them jumping rapidly from moment to moment, expressing a curiosity about the multiplicity inside any single instant. The resulting work is a rapidly shifting series of ideas. The second an idea approaches full definition the dancers bound off to a new one. Thompson congeals in the final moments of the work as she stands at a microphone, subtly shifting her hips and torso while slowly pulling her hair up over her head and singing. It’s dreamy, sexy, and unreal.”
– Maura Donohue, Culturebot