Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly "Armory Show"
Park Avenue Armory
This event has ended.
Moving Theater, in association with Park Avenue Armory, is pleased to announce the world premiere of Armory Show for an exclusive two-night engagement, Saturday and Sunday, February 20 and 21 at 8 p.m. As their 18-month residency nears an end, Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly reflect on the complex military and social history of the space, as well as their artistic and personal experience working there. Specifically designed for Park Avenue Armory’s landmark period rooms, the work combines choreography, text and video to address issues of history and memory, the epic and the ephemeral, and constructions of male identity. It features three new music works composed by Du Yun, Mario Diaz de Leon and Nathan Davis, commissioned by Moving Theater and performed live by the acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE).
Well known for its vast drill hall, Park Avenue Armory also houses a suite of exuberant period rooms described by the New York City Landmarks Commission as “the single most important collection of 19th-century interiors to survive intact in one building.” Armory Show moves the audience through these landmark reception rooms, designed by such masters of the American Aesthetic Movement as Louis Comfort Tiffany, and brings forward the underlying tension contained in these spaces. With a pared-down, minimalist aesthetic, the ensemble of five men and one woman perform dances reminiscent of the military drills and industrial processes inextricably linked to the expansion of America’s wealth at the time of the building’s construction in the 1870s. The period rooms’ lush and decadent décor – caught in various stages of decay and restoration – are addressed through quotations of classical ballet. In this dialogue between gendered vocabularies – the militarized drill and the effeminized ballet – Armory Show pulls at the historical claims the site’s décor has made on the male body while articulating new constructions of male identity. The performance includes texts which reference both historical and contemporary collective struggles, obliterating the distance of this one-time fortress from the world outside its walls.
“Armory Show draws from our experiences over the course of our residency,” Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly explain. “The project includes objects we discovered at the Armory and 19th-century music once performed by the Seventh Regiment’s marching band, in addition to referencing our interaction with residents of the women’s shelter housed at the Armory and the Knickerbocker Greys who continue to drill just outside our studio. But more than a catalogue of observations, this work maps our sense of loss at leaving a space we’ve worked in for such an extended period of time. Our attempts at capturing its complex history bring forth our own experience in this incredible building.”
Conceived and choreographed by Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly
Performances by Jonathan Drillet, Davon Rainey, Jose Tena, Marlene Saldana, Anthony Whitehurst
Original music composed by Nathan Davis, Mario Diaz de Leon, and Du Yun and performed by and ICE | International Contemporary Ensemble
Lighting design by Marcus Doshi
Costumes by Camille Assaf
Media
Schedule
from February 20, 2010 at 20:00 to February 21, 2010