iLAND

Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art Nature and Dance

ArtsPool Member

Daniel Rosza Lang/Levitsky

Daniel is a cultural worker and organizer based at Brooklyn’s Glitter House. Can’t stop picking things up on the street and making other things out of them – outfits, collectives, performances, barricades, meals…  Never learned how to make art for art’s sake; rarely likes working alone. Multi-generational radical and queer – just another gendertreyf apikoyrus mischling fem dyke who identifies with, not as.  JUST LIKE THAT draws on experience as an on-stage dancer, a going-out-dancing dancer, and a participant in street actions over two decades, as well as puppetry and spectacle theater work. Recent projects have included “Hysterical Translations” (solo work at Dixon Place); “The Greatest Show on Earth in a Cardboard Box” (with Ariel Speedwagon, at the Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics’ 2014 Encuentro); J Dellecave’s “Angry Women REvisited” (HERE Performing Arts Center & Dixon Place’s HOT Festival); several endeavors with choreographer Abigail Levine; and co-editing “Dreaming In Public: Building the Occupy Movement” with Amy Schrager Lang.  Ongoing work includes continuing the Critical Reperformance series (so far including works by Schneeman, Jonas, Warhol, and Abramović); hitting the streets with the Rude Mechanical Orchestra’s Tactical Spectacle dance & performance team; creating radical Jewish extravaganzas with the Aftselokhes Spectacle Committee; and Palestine solidarity work with the Jewish Voice for Peace Artists & Cultural Workers Council.

JUST LIKE THAT

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Saturday April 11 1-4pm | Guest Star Ebony Noelle Golden

Kymberle Project: 1332A Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11216

Sunday April 12 1-4pm | Guest Star Nicole Bindler

Tesseract: 22 Midwood St, Brooklyn, NY 11225

How can we use what we know from the dance floor – whether in the studio, at the club, on stage, or in ritual spaces – in street actions for justice? in collective decision-making? in the many spaces we move through as socially engaged inhabitants of our city?  What happens when we take ‘the choreography of social movements’ seriously, and work to develop it as a way of getting things done concretely?

Each afternoon we will explore different aspects of embodied knowledge and political movement, through bodily experimentation in the studio and in public space.  Guest stars Ebony Noelle Golden (Saturday) and Nicole Bindler (Sunday) will guide us through their ongoing work and new experiments.  We’ll try out street tactics for confrontational situations; collaborative approaches to bodily presence in public space that trouble the line between symbolic and material impact; somatic strategies for staying connected to ourselves and our aims; and improvisational tools to cultivate non-verbal group communication and decision making.  We’ll test new hypotheses and adapt old ones to new circumstances.  We’ll articulate what our bodies already know, and develop ways of building on it through both words and movement.

April 11: Ebony Noelle Golden’s Fire/Water: Performance Beyond Protest is an intensive cultural organizing and solo performance workshop for artists and non-artists invested in everyday performances of love, vision, resistance, and renewal. The session, comprised of unique blend of socio-cultural devised performance and creative design, culminates in a sharing of community-sourced tools and boundary-pushing performances for radical community transformation. We will meet at Kymberle Project (1332A Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11216). Take the A, C, or S to Nostrand Station.

April 12: Nicole Bindler will facilitate experiments with somatics and improvisational performance practice in the context of political action. We will investigate how the skills of the dance-artist translate into the street. We’ll begin in a quiet studio with a Body-Mind Centering® warm-up focusing on the experiential anatomy of the skeleton. This somatic practice will prepare us for engagement with others. Then we’ll do simple contact improvisation partnering to integrate the skeletal work with another person. We’ll increase the size of the groupings until we are dancing all together in ensemble. Then we’ll go outside and see how we can maintain the grounding and clarity of our studio practice in the street. With more sensory stimulation, we’ll notice when we become saturated and develop strategies to stay connected to ourselves and our underlying purpose. We’ll use the tools of improvisational performance practice to cultivate non-verbal group communication and decision making in the moment. We will meet at Tesseract (22 Midwood St, Brooklyn, NY 11225). Take the Q, B, or S to Prospect Park Station.