THIS DANCERIE | New Love, 1910: World Out of Kilter
New Love: 1910…and Paris, 1938 are the first two projects of This Dancerie, a multi-event, multi-site, multi-media cycle of works exploring Paris as the site of same sex desires, creating a queer century despite prohibitions against the manifestation of those desires. These works are being produced in partnership with Obscura Broadcasting Company and Association Errances.
A Performance/Installation by Tony Whitfield/Whitfield Colabs
Composer & Audio Visual Master: Andrew Alden
Director & Writer: Oisin Stack
Choreographer (Paris): Alexandre Bado
Choreographer (New York): Yoshiko Chuma
In New Love: 1910: World Out of Kilter, Tony Whitfield collaborates with choreographer Alexandre Bado, director Oisin Stack, composer/musicians, Andrew Alden and William Basinski, with performers, and videographers in an evening length response to Adrien Barrere’s 1910 film, Tom Pouce Suit Une Femme, a work about an unlikely romance and the persistence, courage and discomfort of pursuing one’s desires. Contextualized by the destabilizing reality of the Great Flood of 1910, that submerged Paris for several weeks, this work is a reverie on love, desire, queerness, deep waters and navigating notions of “sexual misconduct.”
The collaborative development process draws upon the input of a group of composers, musicians, live performers, and videographers/editors and a broad range of gay, lesbian, trans, queer and gender non-conforming folk from New York and Paris. Their experience contributes to a New Love: 1910: Life Out of Kilter’s combination of video, film, movement, live music and testimony in its narrative delivery.
In addition the video installation, Paris, 1938, will be shown in the adjacent gallery beforehand (free admission). In this work Tony Whitfield proposes versions of what many believe was a same sex relationship, resulting in an assassination, that launched Kristallnacht, an explosion of Jewish persecution by Nazis, constituting a critical pre-WW2 staging of the Holocaust. More information about video installation dates and times available below.
MORE ABOUT NEW LOVE: 1910
“In the US, in the current context in which male sexuality and its expressions are under the microscope and the way in which one expresses one’s desire, particularly desire that the mainstream invalidates, it seems important to me that we not lose sight of the nature and realization of one’s deep and persistent desires for another, the extent to which expressing that desire is not only an exercise of power, but a critical, human moment that is sometimes painful, sometimes marvelous, sometimes brave, sometimes welcomed, sometimes repulsed, sometimes embraced, sometimes triumphant, sometimes devastating and transformative.”
– Tony Whitfield
New Love: 1910: Life Out of Kilter begins with Adrien Barrere’s 1910 film, Tom Pouce Suit Une Femme, a work about unlikely romance and the persistence, courage and discomfort of pursuing one’s desires. Contextualized by the destabilizing realities of the Great Flood of 1910 that submerged Paris into icy waters for several weeks and the emotional trauma of this historical moment, New Love is a meditation on love, desire, and queerness. The short film was critiqued at that time in the review, Motography as a work that “embodies in quintessential form the kind of vulgarity and horseplay that has been the basis of so many motion picture attacks.”
This is the second work presented of This Dancerie, Tony Whitfield’s ten part cycle of projects exploring queer life in Paris over the last century. New Love: 1910: Life Out of Kilter offers points of departure for explorations of themes and issues that will span the coming century and is the point of departure for the exploration of the resilience of desire and the queer human spirit as it surfaces through non-conformity developed through a collaborative process with a diverse group people whose relationships to the world defy binary conventions.
ABOUT WHITFIELD COLABS
Whitfield CoLabs creates contexts that presentTony Whitfield is an artist, designer whose work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums including the New York’s Museum of Art and Design, Leslie Lohman Museum of Lesbian and Gay Art, The Pop-Up Museum of Queer History and the Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano in Lima, Peru and published in the US and abroad. Whitfield has also written about art, new media, film, performance and design. As the president and principal designer of Red Wing & Chambers Inc, Whitfield produced custom and limited edition furniture, products and lighting for residential and small business environments. Whitfield has also held leadership positions in New York’s arts community including Director of Printed Matter, Inc., Associate Director of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Senior Policy Analyst for Cultural Affairs in the Office of the Manhattan Borough President, as well as Program Director at Just Above Midtown, Inc. Whitfield’s writing about art, design, performance, film and video as a medium for cultural criticism has been included in numerous publications over the last three decades. An Associate Professor of Art and Design Studies he has served in various leadership roles including Associate Dean for Civic Engagement, Chair of the Product Design Department and Director of the Furniture Program at Parsons The New School of Design.
ABOUT THIS DANCERIE
The pretext of This Dancerie is urbanization as a prerequisite for modern homosexual subculture and the understanding that despite the lack of recognized communities or “gay ghettos,” gay men have lived forbidden aspects of their lives in many cities, in public.
This Dancerie focuses on Paris as a crossroad of queer life in which, although, technically, homosexuality was legal since 1791, notions of public decency were legislated and under surveillance and further complicated by the re-criminalization of same-sex relations during the Nazi occupation that remained in place until the 1980s. This Dancerie seeks to illuminate transitions in identity that evolve for cisgender males over the course of a century, moving from the modern construct of the homosexual to current articulations of “queerness; look at the persistence of public expressions of identity that defy binary gender definition across the century; reflect the critical social events that have had an impact on “queer” lives ranging from wars to public health crises to liberation struggles to fashion and entertainment; reflect the intersections of class, race, ethnicity, economics, politics and creed as well as immigration patterns that have created evolving heterogeneity in the French populus; reflect changing technologies that have supported notions of self actualization while challenging policies and practices that have defined standards of public decency.
Unifying the works in the Dancerie cycle will be the personal responses of the project Artistic Director, Tony Whitfield rooted in understandings of the narrative underlying each work in the cycle to their relationships to contemporary socio-political issues. This Dancerie will highlight a series of sites and events across Paris of historical importance for gay men as members of a broader social context. For each site, narratives based on actual events will be developed and represented in public works that range from image projections to performing arts-based works/events. Each narrative will seek to elaborate aspects of gay history and the intersection of that history with issues of race, class, creed, ethnicity, ability and gender. The role immigration has played will also be underscored in This Dancerie.
Over the course of the next five years, Whitfield plans to execute ten works that will constitute This Dancerie in locations across Paris where same sex desire has created a shifting landscape of encoded behavior, transgressive beauty and seduction, criminalized activity, class-complicated entanglements, immigrant survival strategies, forbidden trans/interactions. As such, they will also employ elements that will seek to engage viewers and community groups in a variety of ways that illuminate connections to the City’s gay history. In situations that range from motion activated videos to dance parties to social media directed investigations, This Dancerie will ask viewers/participants to question what it means to live a forbidden life in public.
All of the This Dancerie’s constituent parts are and have been conceived and developed with the goal of presentations in Paris and New York, as well as other cities with the desire of creating contexts for discussion that have international implications in a framework that encourages analysis and comparison. Toward that end, international creative teams are being engaged various collaborative activities that are integral to each project’s realization.
To date, support for This Dancerie has been provided by The Jerome Foundation, The New School University, and contributions of private donors through crowdfunding campaigns. Administrative support in France is provided by Association Errances and fiscal sponsorship in the US is provided by Fractured Atlas.
CAST & CREATIVE TEAM
for New Love: 1910: Life Out of Kilter
Performers
Nico Brown, Mike Cotayo, Maxfield Haynes, Matt Knife, Mike Russnak, Kaz Senju
Composer & Audio Visual Master: Andrew Alden
Music Excerpts by: William Basinski
Director & Writer: Oisin Stack
Choreographer (Paris): Alexandre Bado
Choreographer (New York): Yoshiko Chuma
Dance Coach: Aaron Moses Robin
Garments & Props: Marian (mau) Schoettle
Hair & Make-up: Matt Kessler
Set Design, Photography & Props: Tony Whitfield
Set Construction: Jonathan Locke and Timehri Studios
Lighting Design: Marie Yokoyama
Stage Management: Nic Adams
Videographers: Andrew Alden, Peifu Chen,
Tom de Pekin, Alexa Reig & John Gilbert Young
Production Assistants:
Aishwarya Janwadkar, Kaz Senju, Francis Ward, David White
Project Administration (Paris):
Alexandra Raluca Bobes, and Association Errances
Artistic Director, Writer, Director, Producer & Mastermind: Tony Whitfield
Composer, Audio Visual Master, Associate Producer, Video Editor & Musician: Andrew Alden
Associate Director & Actor: Oisin Stack
Actor & Translator: Nils Nusens
Cinematographer: Sebastiano d’Ayala Valva
Video Editor: Joe Lumbroso
Project Administration (Paris): Alexandra Raluca Bobes and Association Errances
Special Thanks to
Obscura Broadcasting Company, The Jerome Foundation, Fractured Atlas, The New School
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Tony Whitfield is an artist, designer and educator whose work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums including the New York’s Museum of Art and Design, Leslie Lohman Museum of Lesbian and Gay Art, The Pop-Up Museum of Queer History and the Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano in Lima, Peru and published in the US and abroad. Whitfield has also written about art, new media, film, performance and design. As the president and principal designer of Red Wing & Chambers Inc, Whitfield produced custom and limited edition furniture, products and lighting for residential and small business environments. Whitfield has also held leadership positions in New York’s arts community including Director of Printed Matter, Inc., Associate Director of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Senior Policy Analyst for Cultural Affairs in the Office of the Manhattan Borough President, as well as Program Director at Just Above Midtown, Inc (aka the Corporation for Art and Television) where, in addition to being instrumental in the management, direction and development of these organizations, he was the principal staff member responsible for curating and producing public events in dance, performance, music, in live and broadcast media. Whitfield has written about these fields and design in a variety publications over the four decades. An Associate Professor of Art and Design Studies at Parsons School of Design, he has held leadership roles including Associate Dean for Civic Engagement, Chair of the Product Design Department and Director of the Furniture Program. http://tonywhitfieldprojects.blogspot.com
Andrew Alden is an American composer from New England. He received his BFA in Film Scoring and Composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston and is the director and composer of the Andrew Alden Ensemble, which is dedicated to exploring new music in the tradition of Bang on a Can All-Stars, Alloy Orchestra, Kronos Quartet and Alarm Will Sound. Alden has performed with Evan Ziporyn and Terry Riley as a member of Gamelan Galak Tika, has scored 20 different films, including spots on NBC, and has toured nationally. Andrew currently lives in Detroit where he works independently as a composer, media producer and visual artist. In January 2018, working as a driving force in collective of musicians and multi-media artists, Andrew launched Obscura Broadcasting Company, dedicated to end to end transmedia, production and the narratives of diverse communities. In the context of that ambition, he began what has evolved into an ongoing association with Tony Whitfield and Whitfield CoLabs, in 2014 on the score for The Silver Rainbow, a documentary on aging among queer people of color.
Alexandre Bado was born in Brazil where he began developing personal and pedagogical language through dance, theater and circus for the past 14 years. He specializes in the search for creative methods and graduated in dance at the Faculty Angel Vianna / RJ. Bado was a recipient of the Adami scholarship for educational research at the National Center of the Dance of Pantin to develop his personal language and currently lives in Paris where he develops his personal work that moves gracefully between circus, dance and cabaret arts and languages that range from boylesque to post-modern tango in his own works as well as numerous companies in France and Brazil. New Love: 1910; World Out of Kilter is Alexandre’s introduction to New York as a either a performer or a choreographer.
William Basinski is an American avant-garde composer, clarinetist, saxophonist, sound artist, and video artist. He is best known for his four-volume album The Disintegration Loops (2002–2003), constructed from rapidly decaying twenty-year-old tapes of his earlier music. A classically trained clarinetist, Basinski studied jazz saxophone and composition at North Texas State University in the late 1970s. In 1978, inspired by minimalists such as Steve Reich and Brian Eno, he began developing his own vocabulary using tape loops and old reel-to-reel tape decks. He developed his meditative, melancholy style experimenting with short looped melodies played against themselves creating feedback loops.
Nico Brown is a dance artist in New York City, originally from rural Illinois. His work has been presented at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival Inside/Out, La Mama Experimental Theater, New York Live Arts, Gibney Dance Center, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and Links Hall (Chicago). His latest solo project will premiere this summer at Pieter Performance Space in Los Angeles. Brown holds an MFA in Dance and BFA in Theater Stage Management from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
At eighteen months old, Mike Cotayo was involved in a drunk driving accident that left him comatose with little hope for survival. After the accident, Mike was diagnosed with a brain injury that left his left side partially paralyzed. Although this was his past, it did not inhibit his future. He has worked nationally, as a stand up comedian; has maintained professional positions as both a social worker and psychotherapist; and in his 30’s he began to become more physically active, lifting weights, boxing, and learning jujitsu.
Peifu Chen is a Taiwanese filmmaker and production designer known for her inventive visual styles. Her Sunrise Department Store commercials series have received accolades such as the Longxi, Asia-Pacific Advertising Awards and Times Advertising Awards for Best Art Direction. In addition to her commercial work, Chen directs music videos, with “Happiness” receiving a nomination for Best Music Video Director at the Golden Melody Awards in Taiwan, “Presque Qui” (performed by Les Chauds Lapin) receiving a selection from The Coolest Music Videos From Around The Globe by National Geographic, and “Put Your Face Down” by Bejing rocker Guo-Ding was selected at 2017 Berlin Fashion Film Festival for Official Online Showroom. Peifu currently resides in NYC and divides her time between The US and China where she works extensively in art films, commercials and installations.
Hanisha Harjani is an artist at the Pratt Institute in New York City whose work explores the relationships between humans and objects. In addition to her studies, Harjani works as a production intern at Bushwick Film Festivals. Queer Home Sweet Home, her 2016 collaboration with Tony Whitfield has been exhibited in New York and Paris.
Marian (mau) Schoettle is a transdisciplinary project artist, exploring and subverting material culture. In 1983 mau established Conceptual Clothing Studio with the conviction that clothing can be a form of social intervention. mau has taught in art and design academies in western Europe; worked collaboratively with artists, dancers, and performers: created sound/light/interactions with the Dutch TROPISTS: designed and made ready to wear, art and performance clothing,: and contributed to social protest marches with interpersonal gift giving. Recent large scale populist projects include the 2014 transformation of the Clouet Gardens in New Orleans , and in 2013 the absurdist multimedia performance/crowd project Dada Spill in an abandoned cement mine in NYS. (with collaborator K. Hamilton). Mau’s work appears in fine art and applied art museum collections including the V & A Museum, the Phila. Art Museum, RISD Art Museum, and the Textile Museum and the Municipal Museum in the Hague in the Netherlands. Mau has received funding from the Mondriaan Foundation, the Amsterdam Art Funds, the British Arts Council and the New York Foundation for the Arts for both clothing and art works. Having lived and worked in the US, the Netherlands and France, mau currently resides in a farm outside of NYC.
Kaz Senju is a visual artist, who was born in Japan, resides in Brooklyn, NY. Senju practices the medium of photography, video, and installation to address his interest in communities that are otherwise under-represented. His recent projects include “3 Years Past” (2014), a documentary film of interviews with high school students from Fukushima, Japan discussing their lives after the nuclear power plant accident in 2011. His most recent photo series “Shinjuku Story” (2017) captures the LGBTQ community in Tokyo though a mixture of portraiture, interviews, video, and street photography. Senju holds B.A. in photography from Parsons, and a candidate for an MFA in photography from ICP/Bard College. His work has been exhibited at the Sikkema Jenkins Gallery, NY (2016), The State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russian (2015), and several group shows in New York City.
Oisín Stack is an Irish born actor working in Paris and London. Born and raised in Ireland, he took his first steps on stage at the age of 10. His vocational training as an actor began in England where he played various roles in the classical and contemporary repertoire. After traveling South America with a street theatre company he studied in Paris the Cours Florent’s Class Libre and then CNSAD (National Superior Conservatory of Dramatic Art ), where he worked with Christophe Rauck, Christophe Rauck, Jean-Luc Revole and Christophe Garcia, Dominique Valadier. His work since finishing his training has led him to many divers projects from performance art in the Theatre 71, to dance and theatre with David Bobée and to assistant directing, translation and acting with Cristian Soto. He also arrears regularly on TV in England on the BBC, the USA on NBC or in France on TF1. His film credits include Luc Besson and Lucas Belvaux. He first began collaborating with Tony Whitfield and Whitfield CoLabs at the initial conceptualization stage of This Dancerie and then became a principal performer and Associate Producer for Paris, 1938 which premiered as an OFF Event of Nuit Blanche 2017, the annual dusk to dawn citywide arts festival that launched Paris’ 2017-18 arts presentation season.
Nils Nusens is a singer, song writer, Trumpet player, Keyboard player composer and actor. Since the 1990’s, Nils has collaborated with Keyboardist, composer, Producer Vincent Theard with other Keyboardist, singer, composer Stephane Le Navellan (with whom he founded the French funk band, 13NRV) and singer Angie Cazaux-Berthias. This experience created the foundation of an enduring collaboration with Vince Theard and Stephane Lenavellan with whom Nils later founded the cult French Funk Band “13NRV” along with composer Olivier Riitano and saxophone player and composer Cyril Guiraud. Nils has also collaborated and played with Cheick Tidiane Seck, the Bernard Allison Band playing trumpet in Paris and in New York, his second home since 2006. In both cities, as well as in Burkino Faso, he has combined his creative activity with a variety of progressive, grassroots entrepreneurial ventures.
Sebastiano d’Ayala Valva is a film director, born in London in 1978. He currently lives in Paris where he graduated from Institut d’Etudes Politiques in 2003. He then took part to the production of short movies and feature documentaries, including Serge July’s documentary Once Upon a Time … Last Tango in Paris. In 2007, he finishes his first documentary as a director Transvestites Also Cry, filmed over three years. The film was selected at various international film festivals and has won the Audience Prize at Roma Doc Fest 2007 and the Best Documentary Award at the 2008 HBO New York Latino Film Festival. He’s currently working on Angel, a feature documentary film on the relation between a transsexual immigrant and prostitute, and his family. He’s also working on the documentary The House of the Father, a father-son confrontation through architecture and film. The project has been selected at the Berlinale Talent Campus 2008, Documentary in Europe 2008, European Torino Days 2008, and is a finalist at the Premio Solinas.
Joe Lumbroso is a director and cinematographer with over 10 years of production experience under his belt and a background in creative direction, cinematography, graphic design, software engineering and business development and the driving force in Brilliant Champions, a full service production company in New York and San Francisco that uses a variety of methods and media to construct engaging and compelling ideas, content, and experiences. Brilliant Champion’s work includes commercial production, music videos, narrative and documentary filmmaking.
Special Event
PARIS, 1938
Location: The Lobby in The Downstairs | 66 E 4th Street, Basement Level | New York, NY 10003
New York Premiere | Free Admission | Running Time: 60 Minutes
Paris, 1938 is a video installation in which Whitfield proposes versions of what many believe was a same sex relationship that resulted in an assassination, foreshadowing current acts of self-radicalized terror and launching Kristallnacht, an explosion of Nazi persecution of Jews that constitutes a critical pre-WW2 staging of the Holocaust.
Video Installation Dates:
Friday, May 11th at 7PM
Saturday, May 12th at 7PM
Sunday, May 13th at 1PM