Sunday Service: Zavé Martohardjono Presents… Megan C. Barton, Salomé Egas, Aviva Jaye, and Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez

Join us for Sunday Service curated by Zavé Martohardjono entitled A Political Relief Party. This gathering and collectivity-oriented evening will include performances, participatory dance, and music with artists Megan C. Barton, Salomé Egas, Aviva Jaye, and Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez.

As those of us with the right to vote get ready to put pen to paper ballot, let’s come together for an evening of performance that asks: Who among us get politically represented? How do we divest, disentangle, decolonize — rather than re-invest in, re-appropriate, re-animate — the failed systems that got us here in the first place? Can we form democratic bodies in a nation-state that denies equity? What does voice and the body give us that legislatures cannot? Can we, tonight, form a temporary body that speaks to a collective freedom?

About the Curator

Zavé Martohardjono is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist interested in geopolitics, social justice, queer glam, and embodied healing. They co-curated Movement Research Fall Festival 2017: invisible material and have exhibited at Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Asian Arts Initiative, Bronx River Art Center Gallery, Center for Art + Thought, Center for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, Gallery 102 at George Washington University, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, SOMArts Gallery, Winslow Garage, and xart splitta in Berlin. They’ve performed at BAAD!, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Boston Center for the Arts, Center for Performance Research, Gibney Dance, Issue Project Room, Panoply Performance Laboratory, Recess, Storm King Art Center, Wendy’s Subway, the Wild Project, and elsewhere. Zavé was in LMCC’s 2017-2018 Workspace Residency program, The Bronx Museum of the Arts’ BxMA Co-Lab Residency, Gibney Dance Work Up 3.0, Shandaken: Storm King, La MaMa, and Chez Bushwick. They co-organize the Potluck Project with artists of color and work at the ACLU to end mass incarceration. They received their B.A. from Brown University and their M.F.A. in Media Arts Production from the City College of New York.

About the Artists

Megan C. Barton is a psychotherapist and movement artist, who’s been dancing for 20 years, and currently trains in Dance and Movement Therapy at the 92nd street Y. Megan finds sustainment in unearthing kinesthetic memories, honest communication through movement, and using the intersections of the ancestral and the now to show up here, to move into what’s next.

Salomé Egas is an Ecuadorian actor, dancer, activist, and arts educator. She graduated from Skidmore College with honors in Dance and Theater, obtained a Master’s degree from NYU Gallatin, focusing her studies in International Education, Mythology, and Performing Arts and is an EmergeNYC 2018 fellow. Salomé’s works aim to combine her passion for the performing arts and social justice with the goal of helping her Latinx and many other international communities to heal from the pain and traumas created by uprootedness and immigration through applied dance and theater. She currently works as a teaching artist at Girl Be Heard and as the creative force behind the dance and theater F.U.N Collective (Fierce Untamed Niñas).

Aviva Jaye is a Brooklyn-based artist + performer who is dedicated to empathy + diversity primarily through music. Her interdisciplinary experience includes theatre, dance, composition +poetry. Aviva currently focuses on performative projects through the lens of community engagement, social justice + DIY resistance. Recent features include Queer Abstract, Brooklyn’s monthly performance series for QTPOC artists; “Four Questions”, a Pride production at LaMama; the Civic Salon series at The Public + the Spring 2018 Artist-In-Residence program at Guildhall in East Hampton.

Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez is a Providence-based artist and educator. His performance and visual art works emerge from his experiences of being a transnational adoptee from Colombia growing up and living in the U.S. and have recently focused on questioning who or what gets to be (in) public, and the limits of empathy when working on problems of structural inequity. Lundberg Torres Sánchez’s work has appeared at the Queens Museum, Bowery Poetry Club, Silent Barn, the Morgan Library & Museum, RISD Museum, Museum of the Moving Image, PHI Centre, The Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts as well as around the globe. Lundberg Torres Sánchez is a resident artist at AS220 in Providence, sits on the board of the Colombian American Cultural Society of Rhode Island, and is the recipient of NEA funding. [jointhebenjam.org / @benjofaman]

About Sunday Service

Taking place the first Sunday of each month, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of cross-disciplinary performances and presentations that brings together a multiplicity of views around a singular prompt, such as a question, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service centers works in progress, interdisciplinary endeavors, and diversity in format showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster the testing of ideas and critical discourse amongst peers.

Sunday Service is programmed by Stephanie Acosta and Alexis Wilkinson, Knockdown Center’s Director of Exhibitions and Live Art.