Artists: Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Effie Bowen, Angie Pittman, Raha, and Travis Sisk / Manifestany Squirtz
March 5, 2017
Niall Jones’ organized an evening that explored the dance party and nightlife, historically and empirically, as a commingling of multiple bodies and multiple ethics. The dance party ostensibly functions as a movement, at once, for and against the sturdiness of identity, and all the while irreducibly in pursuit of (un)certain pleasures and intractable notions of self. Invited participents were Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Effie Bowen, Angie Pittman, Raha, and Travis Sisk / Manifestany Squirtz, who shared work across mediums
Night, the persistence of virtuosic utterances, when language slips into dance, into moan.
About the Artists
Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves is an artist chiefly concerned with postcolonial ethnobotany working in the mediums of scholarship, corporeal wisdom, archival gesture and language. She lives and works in New York City where she is currently completing work on The Bulletin of Wilderness and Academy: an introductory conclusion to unschoolMFA forthcoming from Organic Electric Industries.
Effie Bowen graduated with a BFA in dance from Hollins University and has since performed work in New York, Berlin, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. Upcoming projects include Transpacific at Northwestern University with Kentaro Kumanomido and DANCE SPORT, a solo at Gibney.
Angie Pittman is a dance artist, educator, and choreographer. Angie has had the pleasure of dancing in work by Ralph Lemon, Jennifer Lacey and Wally Cordona, Tere O’Connor, Jennifer Monson, Johanna S. Meyer, Kyli Kleven, Anna Sperber, and others. Angie has performed her work at BAAD!, Movement Research at Judson Church, Triskelion Arts, and STooPS. She holds a MFA in Dance and Choreography from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a graduate minor in African American Studies and a BA in Dance from Old Dominion University. She was a 2015 DanceWEB scholar for Impulstanz Dance Festival in Vienna, Austria and is a 2016 Artist-in-Residence with Movement Research. Angie’s work resides in a space that investigates how her body moves through ballad, groove, sparkle, spirit, spirituals, ancestry, vulnerability, and power.
Raha is a performing artist, dancer and writer. She holds a Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her interests lie at the intersections of urban politics, postcoloniality, critical dance studies and embodiment.
Manifestany Squirtz (aka Travis Steele Sisk) is a Brooklyn drag performance artist. Born out of condom wrapper on corner of Jefferson and Knickerbocker Ave, their sorted life as a performer has brought the masses gender-bending sex appeal and appalling stage behavior. A four time performer of Bushwig (Brooklyn’s annual non-gender conformist performance onslaught) and the former producer/host of RITUAL, a now deceased monthly queer cabaret.
About the Curator
Niall Jones is a dance artist and educator working in New York City and Philadelphia as a visiting professor in the Performance + Performance Studies graduate program at Pratt Institute and is Assistant Director for the School of Dance at the University of the Arts. Niall’s work collects between performance and visual art modalities; disorientation, pleasure, and materiality serve as conceptual access points related to structures of time and exhaustion and impermanence.
About Sunday Service
Sunday Service is a curated series of short-form live performances across mediums. Taking place the first Sunday of each month in the Ready Room, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of in-progress works, performances, and presentations, anchored by a framing principle such as a question, proposition, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service encourages works in progress and interdisciplinary endeavors showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster experimentation and critical discourse amongst peers.
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Knockdown Center’s MEDIA page is an ongoing collection of audio, video, writing, and ephemera produced by our arts programming. It serves not only as an aural and visual index of the diverse artistic activities that occur within the space, but also as a resource for artists, writers, curators, and researchers who may be interested in learning more about the practitioners that come through our doors. As a primary source, documents housed within the MEDIA page have been minimally edited and largely unmodified. Audio files link to our Soundcloud channel, where curator conversations, exhibition walkthroughs, panels, and poetry readings can be heard individually, or as select playlists.