INSITU 2018 Audience Movement Workshops

INSITU Site-Specific Dance Festival, named by the New York Times as one of “15 Summer Dance Festivals, Portland to Vail” to see this summer, announces four audience movement workshops. Festival attendees are encouraged to participate in four short, fun workshops, guided by 2017 INSITU festival choreographers at the end of three performance sequences at 2 p.m., 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. on August 4 and 5, 2018 in all four parks. “We wanted festival goers to experience the choreographic process firsthand at this year’s festival,” says Svea Schneider, founder and artistic director of INSITU. “Participants will experience four unique ways of creating a dance work through these guided experiences.”

Move Your Number in Queensbridge Park (volleyball court)
In Move Your Number, Christopher Núñez creates a choreographic game on the volleyball court of Queensbridge Park. 10 volunteers from the audience will be invited to take a number and improvise a movement that the whole audience will learn, one at the time. After all 10 volunteers execute their individual movement, everyone gathered for the experience will create their own choreographic score using at three of the learned movements.

Christopher Núñez is a Brooklyn-based queer choreographer known as “Unpezverde”. His work is provocative and political. Unpezverde has been presented at INSITU Site-Specific Dance Festival, The Leslie Lohman Museum for Gay and Lesbian Art, and Movement Research at The Judson Memorial Church, among others.

Breathing with Strangers in Hunters Point South Park (railway ties)
In Breathing with Strangers, Kinesis Project dance theatre’s Melissa Riker will guide audiences in a quickly creative, narrative experience on the railway ties of Hunters Point South Park. Consider the quiet of a subway car, your music in your ears. Now, think of the best moment you’ve witnessed between New Yorkers. Whether in an audience, on a bus, or in a quick conversation on the street, our time with strangers is how urban lives move forward.

Kinesis Project dance theatre is a non-profit organization that creates site-specific dance performances and facilitates educational programs. The company, founded and directed by choreographer Melissa Riker, is dedicated to creating large-scale, site-specific, and unexpectedly intimate dance performances.

Hands On, Eyes On, Bodies Moving: Exploring Site-Specific Choreography at Socrates Sculpture Park (stone platform)
In Hands On, Eyes On, Bodies Moving, The Equus Projects’ JoAnna Mendl Shaw will lead participants in creating a kinetic partnership WITH the stone platform in Socrates Sculpture Park. In this short exploration of the basics of creating a site-specific choreographic score, participants will perform a movement motif, phrase or physical task in order to focus on a specific quality of the site.

Internationally recognized site works creator, The Equus Projects builds performances that focus on visceral engagement with the natural and cultural environment, in events that often feature humans in dynamic partnership with horses.

Space Pillars at Gantry Plaza State Park (Pepsi Cola sign)
In Space Pillars, Parcon NYC’s Cecilia Fontanesi invites the audience to explore the space around the dazzling Pepsi-Cola sign. Participants are encouraged to move in different ways, like walking, running, jumping, rolling, and crawling. They will be (literally) in touch with each other and with the sign’s pillars through hands, forearms, heads, shoulders, backs, hips, and feet. Together participants will reflect on what it means to be given space, to hold it, and to intersect the space of others.

Cecilia Fontanesi is the co-founder of Parcon NYC, a collective of dancers and movers dedicated to challenging our connection to the environment and social relationships through play, movement, touch, and reflection. Parcon NYC has been practiced and performed in public spaces open and available to everyone. As a collective, Parcon NYC is committed to engaging people across gender, ethnicity, age, and ability.

ABOUT INSITU Site-Specific Dance Festival
The first of its kind in Queens, INSITU Dance Festival, named by the New York Times as one of “15 Summer Dance Festivals, Portland to Vail” to see this summer, is a unique cultural offering that takes place at four public parks along the East River waterfront in Queens. Comprised of a two-day dance festival and a month-long community dance workshop series, INSITU invites neighborhood residents and visitors to discover LIC through dance. All INSITU programming is free and open to the public, making the arts accessible to the whole community and encouraging people from different backgrounds to engage, create and connect. Visit insitudancefestival.com for program information.