Skip to main content
Oct 01

Tamar Ettun: Mauve Bird with Yellow Teeth Red Feathers Green Feet and a Rose Belly, PART BLUE

By

Mauve Bird with Yellow Teeth Red Feathers Green Feet and a Rose Belly, PART BLUE is a performance and immersive psychological landscape by Tamar Ettun and her performance group The Moving Company. Using dance, sound, vast colors, and everyday object assemblages, Ettun seeks to locate a bodily impulse for empathy. This marks the first part of a performance tetralogy, each associated with colors and seasons (Blue/Winter, Red/Spring, Yellow/Summer, Orange/Fall). A new installment will premiere each year until the completion of the project in 2018.

PART BLUE starts as a still formal sculpture, in which the movers are bound to one another as an apparatus made of humans and objects. The elements lean against one another, so the connections among objects and humans are necessary but tenuous; if anyone were to let go, the machine would collapse on itself entirely. The performers begin to mirror each other’s movements, eventually leaving their places in the system. Each one develops her own unique set of repetitive movements emanating from her object. This piece confronts our own mechanized psychological defenses with accumulated gestures. Through contradiction and complement in stillness and movement, viewers are invited to enter the moving installation, while the various scenes and the performers/movers mirror each other in search of primal empathy.

This performance follows Tamar Ettun’s solo exhibition at Fridman Gallery in NYC, featuring sculptural and video portions of this project.

The Moving Company performers: Maia Karo, Laura Bernstein , Sabrina Shapiro , Rebecca Pristoop , Tina Wang , Mor Mendel, Tamar Ettun. Costume design by Ella Dagan

Sep 01

Fable

By

Filmmaker Derrick Belcham (La Blogotheque, A Story Told Well) and choreographer Emily Terndrup (Sleep No More) present FABLE, a new evening-length production set in Knockdown’s sprawling 50,000-square-foot space.

Featuring original music performed live by Blonde Redhead, Julianna Barwick, Porcelain Raft, David Moore (Bing & Ruth), Skyler Skjelset (Fleet Foxes, Beach House), Sarah Neufeld (Arcade Fire), White Hinterland, Prince Rama and Hannah Epperson.

Following the success of “Debut” (2014) and “The Wilder Papers” (2013) at Knockdown Center, Derrick Belcham and Emily Terndrup have developed their most ambitious project to date, merging independent music, immersive dance theater and large-scale art installation.

The production features a giant, sound-reactive enclosure that showcases a different, acclaimed musician for each of the six performances, a 360-degree sound environment and an expansive array of transforming light systems from floor to ceiling. In a shifting proscenium, an unpredictable choreographic and theatrical narrative  immerses the audience on a depicting a revelatory encounter between a man and a mysterious voice who, over the course of a surreal and increasingly volatile evening, explore the variable boundary between delusion and actuality through the incomparable expanse of a century-old structure.

Choreographed by Emily Terndrup in collaboration with the dancers, the performance features Rebecca Margolick, Ashley Robicheaux, Kenna Tuski and Dan Walczak.

Following months of writing, rehearsal, residency and strategy, the devoted and determined team “Fable” needs support to bring this ambitious project to life: fable.belchamterndrup.com 

Thursday, October 8th: Sarah Neufeld (Arcade Fire)

Friday, October 9th: Julianna Barwick

Saturday, October 10th: Porcelain Raft / White Hinterland

Thursday, October 15th: David Moore (Bing & Ruth)

Friday, October 16th: Blonde Redhead / Prince Rama

Saturday, October 17th: Skyler Skjelset (Fleet Foxes) / Julianna Barwick

Jul 03

This Takes Place Close By: an opera by thingNY

By
“This Takes Place Close By” is a new opera, written collaboratively by the music ensemble thingNY, exploring the fractured world that follows in the wake of a devastating storm. The audience enters the large, dark Knockdown Center, minimally set with rubbish and flickers of light. A soundscape of voices, instruments and electronics from twenty different sound sources imbues the space with a desolate mood. Listeners travel around the space experiencing different perspectives on the songs and stories of six characters as they cope with the sporadic destructiveness of nature.
Apr 10

REHEARSAL

By

REHEARSAL was a works-in-progress showing of various types of performance works. At every REHEARSAL an artist or group presented with the opportunity to hear feedback from others. Loosely following the Liz Lerman Critical Response structure, moderator Sophia Cleary provided a structured space for feedback open to the audience. By creating a consistent artist-centered space for works-in-progress showings, REHEARSAL aimed to provide rich and respectful feedback to performing artists in all stages of work.

Work was presented by:
Samuel Jojo Ashford, November 15, 2012
Max Price, October 25, 2012
Kirsten Schnittker, October 11, 2012

 

Jan 14

Choreography

By

Created for the vaulted, panoramic structure of The Knockdown Center, choreographer Michou Szabo premiered a new evening length dance work that re-imagined and exhausted a single strand of movement from Szabo’s The Wild Heart (2012) in four distinct movements.

Choreography displayed the work of Nic Petry- Video Deisgn, Bobby McElver- Composer and Sound Design, and Joe Levasseur- Lighting Design.

“I believe in movement
I believe in form
I believe in shifting
I believe in standing still
I believe in swollen
I believe in love
I believe in turbulent swirls
I believe in empty
I believe in the human body
I believe in choreography”
-Michou Szabo

Jan 07

Transient’s Theme

By

Presented in four movements throughout Knockdown Center’s galleries and main spaces, TRANSIENT’S THEME was Bethany Ides’ month-long, soapoperatic document of the trans-temporal, polymorphic exploits of the work’s protagonist, The Transient.

The Transient is a restless spirit who flits between presences & poleis, perpetrators & victims of hysteria, histrionics, conspicuous communitarianism & tele-para-pseudo-phones. As the Transient attempts to blend in, its movements–– modal shifts–– become the only way to detect it. You might see a rustling in & among bodies, escaping & undoing things, in disguise as a gallery opening, an academic conference or a project fundraiser. It is sneaking, nobody suspects a thing until it’s been piped in through the air vents & it’s everywhere, this sudden strangeness. Whose shadow is this? Detective? For all I can tell there’s no such thing as repetition, only this insistent, persistent rhythm.

The month-long opera was presented in four movements:

ACT I: Causing It
An exhibition curated by Andrew Beccone & Pierre Alexandre de Looz
“MYMEOGRAPH” by Pierre Alexandre De Looz and Andrew Beccone and DEUX VACANCES by Tim
Simonds Exhibition/Installation
The work irrigates Knockdown’s accessible and inaccessible spaces, with no interest in productivity- babble and dribble.
ACT III: Conference is Transference
A conference organized w/ Mitchell Akiyama
ACT IV: Traumathon
A fundraising festival

Jan 07

Performance Voyage 4

By

Produced by Artists’ Association MUU, Performance Voyage is an annual tour of international video performances. The Performance Voyage 4 compilation from 2014 contained 14 video performances by artists from all over the world. The tour produced over 20 events in 14 different countries.

The theme of Performance Voyage 4 was SELF-PORTRAIT, offering a variety of possibilities for the artists as well as the audience: the works challenged spectators to reflect upon their own self as well. Jury members for the Performance Voyage 4 included Taina Erävaara, Leena Kela and Timo Soppela.

ARTISTS & WORKS:
Anastasia Ax & Marja-Leena Sillanpää: Scream to Scream (Sweden)
Alex Bodea: nine line poems of alex bodea (Romania/Germany)
Elina Brotherus: Francesca Woodman’s Aunts (Finland)
Cristian Chironi: Sticker (excerpt) (Italy)
Chun Hua Catherine Dong: When I Was Born (China/Canada)
Allison Halter: Salt Lick (USA/Germany)
Constantin Hartenstein: FIT (Germany)
Marja Helander: Trambo (Finland)
Marianne Myungah Kim: Remember everything (Korea/USA)
Verica Kovacevska: The Artist (Macedonia/Switzerland)
Julia Kurek: Message (Poland)
Marika Orenius: Talking about… (Finland)
Benas Šarka: Wall Soul (Lithuania)
Minna Suoniemi: Lullaby (Finland)
The Exhibition in MUU Gallery (April 2014) included also an Installation by Romulo Banares: Feed me back (Spain).

Jan 07

past present futures

By

Showcased in an evening of performances presented by NYPAC, the New York Performance Artists Collective, past present futures was an experimental presentation curated by Samuel Draxler: over three performances, temporal borders were broken and the seam between times were blurred.

Pierre de Fermat, writing a note in the margin of Diophantus’ Arithmetica in 1637, claimed to have discovered “a truly marvelous proof… which this margin is too narrow to contain.” The historical record is insufficient to verify whether Fermat had actually solved the problem, or if the statement was pure bravado. Scientific methodology, like that of an archeological excavation, allows a form of history to be reconstructed — “now” being a fog that slowly overwhelms access to an unmediated past. The recovered materials, as relics of another time, yield certain information about their production. This information is recovered in spite of its present context. This friction between times is what happens when past and present speak at one another, when they misrecognize each other, when the borders collapse under extravagant claims and counterfactuals, when ghosts brag of feats and historians get their hands dirty. Fictive archeology, mysticism and the occult, ritualized action: these conflicting methods each connect with the present by narrating the past.

For past present futures, Meredith Neuman reprised Witch-hunting: What’s In It For Me?, guiding the audience through the identification and elimination of witches that hide amongst us (no previous experience necessary). Sara Grace Powell lead the audience on a paranormal walking tour along the site’s absent infrastructure. The evening culminated in Ashley’s presentation of an excerpt from KIDNAP ME, a mix of dance, performance, and live drawing that constitutes an “experiment in duration.”

past present futures was held in collaboration with And The Villagers Never Liked You Anyway, an exhibition and archeological survey conducted by Sorry Archive under the direction of Dr. Ulf Hueber.

Dec 31

The Wilder Papers

By

In June of 2014, choreographer/director, Emily Terndrup and writer/director, Derrick Belcham presented “The Wilder Papers”, an experiential narrative surrounding the lives of the composer Julian Wilder and the choreographer, Dorienne Lee.

Presented free of charge by way of a generous commission from the Knockdown Center, the event was invitation only and marketed by word of mouth. For one night only, ten dancers transported the audience back to the 1950’s, leading them through every remote corner of the Knockdown Center’s voluminous space to a live score set by five musicians.

Find out more information on the productions of Emily Terndrup and Derrick Belcham.

See The Wilder Papers Selected Moments on vimeo.

 

 

 

 

Skip to content