ROSEKILL in ROSENDALE, NY
Essential Departures Workshop
A public performance series will follow the workshop on July 23rd, 2pm-11pm.
ESSENTIAL DEPARTURES WORKSHOP
A week-long feminist experiment testing (and subverting) the parallels drawn between women’s bodies and Nature at Rosekill Farm, performance venue in rural Upstate New York. Our testing grounds will be copses, swamps, and overgrown meadows. Our site buildings are hay barns and sheds. Our human bodies are earthly, biological bodies, yes. But our female-identifying bodies are not ‘closer’ to nature for that identification, nor is nature a woman to be wooed or plundered, bewitched by or won. Our time at Rosekill will be spent in an attempt to make distinct our bodies, their actions and our connectivity on site.
ABOUT ESSENTIAL DEPARTURES
What happens when female identifying live artists rattle essentialisms around being intrinsically bound to Nature? Knowing these analogies are historically tied to sexist, racist and colonialist discourses around purity, fertility, and the earth, can we form a new politics of the rural?
In this second incarnation of ESSENTIAL DEPARTURES, we push further afield! Drawing from the base laid down by last year’s collective, we return to Rosekill Farm to make new action, to feed our relationships with site and with one another, and to hear new voices. We return to negotiate, modify, and expand conceptions of gender and ‘the wild.’
Women are subjected to discourses around property and bodies, whether those bodies be flesh bodies, soil bodies, or bodies of water. We are contested ground-- possessed or dispossessed. And, no matter where we stand, how we move, where we come to rest, we will find ourselves on contested ground. We propose Rosekill as site and opportunity to explore these bodies, exiled spaces and liminal grounds. Exploring these cracks, cracks as much on our skin as in the planet’s fault lines, may allow us to consider complicity in and articulate resistance to oppressive colonial and neoliberal discourses. We may depart from our usual roads, but we do not come to Rosekill to escape or retreat. Through performance we have the power to act in these in-between-places, places of boundaries and borders, to form new bodies and to diffuse our embodied knowledge through space.
Our week at Rosekill will be collaborative and rigorous. We will approach our subject with workshops, seminars, discussions, culminating with the presentation of solo work. We will balance structure and contributing content with time and space to create and collaborate.
Rosekill Farm will provide a space to incubate and collaborate. Radical practitioners can share in a process of exploration, and present developed works on our communal core subject of articulating ourselves as distinct from, yet responsive to and activist in, our surroundings. Autonomous in our identities as women, we will consider the immediacy of the body and its potential for compassionate communication through the nonverbal. How are we complicit in our own fetishization? We need distinction from essentialized notions of the feminine in nature to regard ourselves clearly and to act in proximity to-- not mired in-- our realm.
Performers:
Olivia Cream
November Wong
Jessi T Walsh
Valerie Sharp
Jamie Morgan
Esther Baker-Tarpega
Barbara Monteiro
Claribel Jolie Pichardo
Jodie Lynkeechow
Madge of Honor
Máiréad Delaney
Tif Robinette (Agrofemme)
​
ABOUT ROSEKILL
Rosekill is a 60+ Acre Nature-Based Performance Art Venue.
Located two hours north of New York City, Rosekill is a beautiful, privately owned patch of raw nature; a former animal farm featuring barns, fields, woods, ponds and more.
Rosekill in an extension of Grace Exhibition Space’s mission to glorify performance art. Performance art-related festivals and workshops are held, allowing artists to present works using both body and mind. Artists are encouraged to engage with their surroundings and participate in the workings of the place.
Artists and audiences are encouraged to bring tents and sleeping bags to sleep under the stars. We cook over a campfire and eat at long picnic tables, then dance around the fire and allow our hearts and minds to expand in a way not possible in the city.
Rosekill is run and operated by Jill McDermid-Hokanson and Erik Hokanson, proprietors of Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn.
www.rosekill.comABOUT GRACE EXHIBITION SPACE
182 AVENUE C NEW YORK, NY 10009
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GRACE:
Grace, n. - simple elegance or refinement of movement
Grace Period - an extended period granted as a special favor
The Three Graces (Greek Mythology) - charm, grace, and beauty
Opened in 2006, Grace Exhibition Space is devoted exclusively to Performance Art. We offer an opportunity to experience visceral and challenging works by the current generation of international performance artists whether emerging, mid-career or established. Our events are presented on the floor, not on a stage, dissolving the boundary between artist and viewer. This is how performance art is meant to be experienced and our mission is the glorification of performance art.
Grace Exhibition Space presents over 30 curated live performance art exhibitions each year, showcasing new work by more than 400 performance artists from across the United States and the world since 2006.
Grace Exhibition Space for International Performance Art Space IRS tax-exempt 501(c)3 status in 2015.
Grace Exhibition Space follows the We Have a Voice Collectives Code of Conduct to Promote Safe(r) Workplaces in the Performing Arts For more information and resources, visit: www.wehavevoice.org