Kayla Farrish: Put Away the Fire, dear, pt. 2
Kayla Farrish
Put Away the Fire, dear pt.2 is Kayla Farrish’s newest evening-length work in development originating with the question of how live performance can be transformed into film. The work is a lens into American cinema from the 1930s to 1960s, focusing on thriller, film noir, romance, and musical. The range of epic to intimate and into meaning pulls through the characters, space, and narratives alongside the exploration of music scores—jazz, symphony, voice, cinematic scores, contemporary sounds, and their distortion. In this second iteration and development of the work, Farrish is discovering more depths of the characters within the work and the blur between film’s structure and experience in live performance. Looking at giving voice, imagery, and life back to BIPOC folks and the marginalized communities, and to offer varying stories for all.
Photos by Elyse Mertz
Performers: Jessica Alexander, Tatiana Barber, James Barrett , Alexander Diaz, Kayla Farrish, Kerime Konur, Curtis Thomas
Music composition: Alex MacKinnon
Music editing: Kayla Farrish
Kayla Farrish/Decent Structures Arts is an emerging company combining filmmaking, storytelling, dance theater performance, and soundscore. The work aspires to liberate and reimagine spaces and life for BIPOC folks and marginalized community with urgency, humanity, and radical imagination. She has been commissioned by various spaces including Gibney Dance, Louis Armstrong House Museum, Danspace Project, Pepatian, Little Island, Harlem Stage, Blacklight/The Clarice among others. She creates works in live performance, theater, site-specific, film, and hybrids. Some of these works of heart: Black Bodies Sonata, The New Frontier: My dear America, On the Sunny Side/Inside the Laughing Barrell, Roster, December 8th, Martyr’s Fiction, and others. She collaborates with musicians, filmmakers, and theaters as a choreographer, director, and filmmaker. Her work recently has been presented at The Clarice, Fusebox Festival, Lincoln Center, Park Avenue Armory, Symphony Space, and National Sawdust. She has been awarded Sundance Uprise Grant for Emerging BIPOC Directors, Bessie Awards for NYLA’s Motherboard Suite and Gibney's December 8th was one of the New York Times‘ Top 2021 Dance Performances - Roster and Breakout Star. She is a recipient of the Harkness Promise Award for 2022. In addition, she has been a freelance performing artist since 2013. During 2022, she was a Rehearsal Director for Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More and adjunct faculty for NYU Tisch Dance.
La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival
La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival continues to support La MaMa’s commitment to presenting diverse performance styles that challenge audience’s perception of dance by featuring performance/installations, experimental film screenings & public symposiums which address dance artists’ engagement with the current political climate, as well as honoring diasporic histories and legacy, ancestral inspirations and inter-generational dialogue.