MAINSTAGE - SPLIT BILL HOT! DANCE MIX Featuring: Sean Thomas Boyt, Claudia Coonan & Stephanie Kleman, Syd Franz & Aviya Hernstadt, Kashia Klancey, and Rodney Murray
About This Show
An evening of dance with Sean Thomas Boyt, Claudia Coonan & Stephanie Kleman, Syd Franz & Aviya Hernstadt, Kashia Klancey, and Rodney Murray
Untitled – Sean Thomas Boyt
Seanshuuraku EXP situates the stage and live performance as opportunities for self-expression and transformation. Specifically, this dance proposes a means for the titular Sean to imagine and build an environment where bodily agency, presentation, and safety are all possible and probable. Can this dance be the final occasion where they use the theater and the edge of the proscenium to take refuge from the outside world? Using improvisational scores, task-based choreography, and interpretive movement as experiments, these devices prescribe limitations that alter their performance: the successes and failures in each iteration are made visible to the performer and viewers alike.
Beautiful Feeling – Claudia Coonan & Stephanie Kleman
This improvisational duet was developed through a common love of collaboration, improvisation, and active self-discovery. Each time this work is performed, it offers a glimpse at / snapshot of the artists’ active exploration of themselves, their identity, how they interact with their environment, and how they navigate their relationship with each other. Keywords that help guide and inform these explorations include groove, shared energies, spatial awareness, queer joy, sexuality & sensuality, wildness, and athleticism.
Thunderbird – Syd Franz & Aviya Hernstadt
We’re playing with a mashup of physical performing mediums alongside Thelma, Louise, and Cher to explore the freedom that comes from the ends (and beginnings) of relationships and the transformative capacity of release. What if instead of life after love, there is love after life? What if taking the risk to leave what’s known pays off and gives us the queer fantasy we all deserve?
I Believed It Too – Kashia Kancey
I Believed It Too asks “When the curtain closes, who are you?”. This work explores trauma, happiness, solace and exhaustion. I am investigating the idea of the mask we all wear. In this journey we begin to see the facade of the soloist fade. She is no longer able to maintain her mask and the secure illusion she has outwardly portrayed. Her perception of reality becomes distorted, putting into question the efficacy of her guise.
ACT THREE – Rodney Murray
I light a candle in an altar but forget your name as it fades [……] An elegy on memory, a door slammed shut, a sunset utterance [……] A dénouement, an attempted resolution, an unwritten stage direction [……] A tender submission to the languages and images of the contemporary [……] ACT THREE is an encounter between the 21st-century body and the languages by which it is written.
About the Artists
Sean Thomas Boyt is a dancemaker, dancer, and dance advocate based out of Philadelphia. Currently, they are working toward a Master of Fine Arts in Dance Studies with an emphasis on Choreography at the University of Iowa. They have recently danced for The Naked Stark, Nora Gibson Contemporary Ballet, Vervet Dance, and Anne-Marie Mulgrew & Dancers Company. Their choreography has been shown throughout New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, D.C., Boston, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Omaha.
Stephanie Kleman is a dance artist currently based in NJ/NYC. In addition to earning degrees in Dance & Exercise Science from SUNY Brockport, Stephanie has presented choreographic & improvisational works in various shows, including at the American College Dance Association’s Mid-Atlantic North Conference in Spring of 2022.
Claudia Coonan is a choreographer from Rochester, NY earning her B.F.A in Dance from SUNY Brockport. Last year she performed a piece choreographed by Anthony Alterio titled ‘FLUFF’ here at Dixon Place. She is so happy to be back sharing her own work.
Aviya Hernstadt (she/her) is a New York-Jewish multidisciplinary performance artist working primarily in movement, autobiography, and comedy. She deconstructs Jewish rituals, traditions, and stories in hopes to dig out their contemporary, diasporic, queer, contexts. In addition to creating and performing her own work, she is currently part of the EmergeNYC Fellowship cohort and collaborates with Yehuda Hyman’s Mystical Feet Company.
Syd Franz (they/them) is a dancer/improviser/drag king who recently moved from San Francisco. Their performance work emphasizes collaboration, creative play, and rigorous movement research to continuously explore identity, community, and queer joy. Lately they’ve been digging into devised theatre, dreaming up highly choreographed group drag numbers, and exploring the fundamentals of mime theatre.
Kashia Kancey is a Miami-born artist who earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Dance from New World School of the Arts. While in school, she performed works by Robert Battle, Ohad Naharin, Mark Morris, and more. Kancey has performed in spaces like New York Live Arts, South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center, MDC Live Arts Theater, Perez Art Museum, Miami History Museum, and the Ailey Citigroup Theater. She has worked with Rosie Herrera Dance Theatre, and is currently working with Adele Myers and Dancers and Abby Z and the New Utility. Kancey is now based in Brooklyn, New York.
Rodney Murray is a Philadelphia-based artist, dancer, and writer. He received his BFA in Directing, Playwriting, and Production at the University of the Arts in 2021, while pursuing additional studies with the School of Dance. He has performed in works created by Paul Matteson, Stephen Petronio, and Paul Taylor, and was recently named a Future Art Writer by Mozaik Philanthropy.
THU. JULY 7, 2022 7:30 PM
General Admission
$18 in advance
$21 at the door
Students/Seniors
$15 in advance
$18 at the door
45 minutes
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