Dixon Place Hosts: Between You and I, Pratt Institute, MFA In Performance And Performance Studies, Thesis Festival 2022
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About This Show
Pratt Institute’s Performance and Performance Studies program is pleased to announce its annual MFA thesis festival showcasing work from the five members of the graduating class of 2022: Rachel Austin, Kym Bernazky, Lila Klatz, Lizbeth Miscles Rivera, and Stephanie Woods. The festival includes theater, choreography, sound art, and installation by the MFA candidates and will take place across two venues, Dixon Place and Pratt Institute’s Dekalb Gallery.
Rachel Austin queers the lines between singer, improviser, songwriter, educator, computer musician, writer, and performance artist. She balances playfulness and obsession and employs both satire and reverence to muddy the binaries of mistake and perfection imposed by whiteness. Ultimately, her deeply embodied voice holds her work together. When not touring, Austin teaches voice and performance, and taught at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland (2009-2013). Her work has been shown around Europe, the US, and Latin America and she has performed with Kronos Quartet, Zeena Parkins, Fred Frith, Okkyung Lee, and Pauline Oliveros. Her book and ep project, learning but never knowing, examined the messy process of decolonizing her body.
Kym Bernazky is a multimedia theater and performance artist and New Yorker. She was artistic-director of Six Characters, an all-silent-vaudeville ensemble, which The New York Times hailed as “a love letter to classic comedy.” Kym has viewpointed/stomped with SITI Company. She created her immersive theatrical installation, Plasticland: A Better Place which was inspired by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. She has read to pigeons at Ann Hamilton’s the event of a thread at The Armory. Her last performance was with Pope L. at MOMA in Dressing Up for Civil Rights. Influential collaborators are WIlliam Cook and the Fraus.
Lila Klatz is a nonbinary lifelong New Yorker in Lenapehoking, currently finishing their MFA at Pratt Institute. Lila is a dance theatre artist, dramaturg, and educator whose practice is queer, embodied, and committed to sustainability and environmental justice. Their work with memoir forms in “Whale Patterns,” “MOLT/MELT/HEAT,” and their drag persona Futchski uses combinations of video, audio, text, images, and performance to explore how we interact, engage with, and internalize our geographical surroundings and experiences. Their published dramaturgy research can be found in “American Musicals in Context” by Dr. Tom Greenfield (ABC-Clio).
Lizbeth Miscles Rivera is a first-generation Mexican artist and writer displaced on the stolen land of the Lenape people. As a writer they highlight performative acts of community care, mourning, and refusal by women and femmes, through the lens of queer, critical race, and post/de-colonial theoretical frameworks. In their art practice, using performance, lens-based media, make-up, creative writing, and sculpture, they deploy the abject to question and blur categories as a way of healing and to make space for their kaleidoscopic queerness. Their work has been published in the fronteristx #FREETHEMALL Immigration Zine in 2021. Their experimental film S.O.S/Eso Es was featured in the Señorita Film Festival in 2019. They were also the first place recipient of the 2019 Hulman Undergraduate Library Research Award, at the University of New Mexico.
Stephanie Woods is an interdisciplinary, contemporary theater and performance artist. Having spent the last decade in Portland, Oregon she performed with Sowelu Theater, The Working Theatre Collective, and was a company member with Imago Theatre from 2015-2020. She produced and wrote work for Rutabaga Story Co. and Portal Productions. Ranging from traditional to site-specific, with an emphasis on collaborating across artistic disciplines, her plays touch on mental health, intimacy in catastrophe, and the search for connection. Lying at the intersection of belonging and separation, they elevate questions over answers to ask, “How do we nurture the small in a world that wants to recognize the large? How do we build closeness in the midst of increasingly isolated platforms of communication?” Her work stands in opposition to big tech in the digital age and encourages a return to physical relationships.
Mon & Tue April 11 & 12th, 2022
Free Admission
Registration required
2 hours with intermission
share £
Credits
Photo Credit
Kym Bernazky
Lila Klatz
Lizbeth Miscles Rivera
Steven Morris
Stephanie Woods.