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Feb 17

Hanne Tierney: Baby, Said Alice B. Toklas

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Knockdown Center is pleased to present Baby, Said Alice B. Toklas, a self-performing object theater produced by artist Hanne Tierney. Installed across the expanse of Knockdown Center’s Annex, a series of vignettes come to life as cloth figures, hula hoops, and satin configurations gesture, twirl, and sway, manipulated by a system of motors and robotic electronics, designed by engineer Oskar Strautmanis. A soundtrack further animates each semi-abstract character, composed of a drifting narrative that stages imagined arguments between Gertrude Stein and her life partner Alice B. Toklas, woven with excerpts from Stein’s early plays, and with music by Erik Satie. Baby, Said Alice B. Toklas will be played on a fifteen-minute loop during gallery hours, offering viewers the possibility of an ongoing encounter with the immersive, ambulatory experience of Tierney’s enchanting work.

Hanne Tierney has performed her puppetry and object theater at The Kitchen, Franklin Furnace, the Queen’s Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA/PS1, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Espace Kiron, Paris, the Akademie der Kuenste, Berlin, and at the Jim Henson International Festival of Puppet Theater. Tierney received an OBIE in 2000. Tierney is the founder and director of Five Myles, an exhibition and performance space in Crown Heights that focuses on engaging directly with the community and presenting work by under-represented artists.

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Knockdown Center’s exhibitions are selected through a competitive open call for proposals. Through a multi-round process, exhibition proposals are reviewed by Knockdown Center’s Curatorial Advisory Board and selected based on quality, distinctiveness, and response to Knockdown Center’s unique site and context within an ecosystem of live events.

Founded in 2015, the Knockdown Center’s Curatorial Advisory Board is currently comprised of seven sitting arts professionals with diverse but overlapping interests and fields of expertise. The Curatorial Advisory Board meets bi-annually to provide critical feedback on a wide range of proposals as well as contributing to discussions about larger programmatic goals. To learn more about proposing an exhibition or short-term project please visit our Proposals Page.

Feb 17

Northern Spy/Clandestine​ Present​s

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Glenn Jones is a master of American Primitive Guitar, a style invented in the late 1950s by John Fahey, whose traditional fingerpicking techniques and wide-ranging influences were used to create modern original compositions. Jones, who led the post-rock ensemble Cul de Sac, brings his own made-up tunings, the use of custom-crafted partial capos, and a highly skilled picking style on both banjo and guitar, to create personal compositions that are lyrical, emotive and elegant. What sets him apart from the myriad guitarists playing today is his ability to tell stories with the guitar and banjo, and to convey a range of emotions. This process starts with the compositions themselves and carries through to his selection of recording environment and engineer.

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Laura Baird is a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and recording engineer. Since 2001 she has performed and recorded as The Baird Sisters with her sister, Meg Baird. She enjoys crossing and blending genres like folk, pop, classical, and electronic, and frequently collaborates with other artists and musicians who work in and between these genres.

ᕕ[ ・ ▾ ・ ]ᕗ

Dave Charles Shuford (aka D. Charles Speer) grew up in Georgia, absorbing the culture and history of the American South before moving to New York in the early 90s. He quickly fell in with the experimental rock underground that has long been an undercurrent of that city’s defining spirit, most notably as a member of the long-running No Neck Blues Band. The loose and free country rock boogie of Speer’s work with the Helix derives power from the tension between these two aspects of his personality, the traditional and the exploratory.

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Neel Murgai is a multi-instrumental performer, composer and teacher from New York City. His life long journey into the depth and beauty of sitar and Indian classical music began with Ravindra Goswami in Banaras, 20 years ago. For the past 14 years Neel has studied with his guru and mentor, Pundit Krishna Bhatt. In addition to sitar, he has since learned to play daf (Persian frame drum) with Soheil Zolfonun and kanjira with V. Nagarajan in Chennai. He has studied overtone singing with the Buriyat performance group Uragsha and Harmonic Choir member, Timothy Hill. Western composition, Neel studied with Edgar Grana.

Feb 16

Sunday Service: Niall Jones Presents

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This month, Knockdown Center invites Niall Jones to curate Sunday Service. Niall has invited Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Effie Bowen, Angie Pittman, Raha, and Travis Sisk / Manifestany Squirtz to share work across mediums. The evening will explore 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.

Night, the persistence of virtuosic utterances, when language slips into dance, into moan.

Watch footage from the evening on our MEDIA page here.

Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves
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
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
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
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 / Travis Steele Sisk
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.

Feb 15

Incarnata Social Club

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Knockdown Center is pleased to present Incarnata Social Club, an evening of experimental performance dedicated to providing visibility to artists at all stages of professional development. Founded in 2016 by artists Kembra Pfahler and Orlando Estrada, Incarnata began as a monthly performance salon in a basement night club in New York City’s East Village. Incarnata has since expanded to become a community and network for performance artists across the country and abroad. Established to provide a space for artists to share new work without an application process, Incarnata is a social club for anti-socials, a party for an-hedonists, and an experimental performance platform.

Performances by:

Chris Cole
Cameron Cooper
Shawn Escarciga
Kayla Guthrie
Nandi Loaf
Pedro Lopez
Cornelius Loy
Bailey Nolan
Coatie Pop
Marie Ségolène
Virgil B/G Taylor
Xirin
Whitney Vangrin

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