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Shared Stage Performance
September 13 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm
Join us for a delightful evening of short performances! This special evening features 3-6 performances, each 10-20 minutes long from artists of different disciplines. This is a chance for artists to share work, or excerpts of their work, alongside other artists. Audiences will be given the option to write a note for each artist, sharing their experience of the work. This is a wonderful opportunity for artists to receive feedback about the impact of their work, and for audiences to feel into the impact of each piece. The mixture of pieces – from dance, to music, to theater, to visual art, to experimental art – makes for a fun, inspiring, and diverse evening.
In September we are thrilled to present (please see longer descriptions below):
- Butoh dance by Meshi Chavez with live music by Lisa DeGrace
- Shadow dance by Steep Horizon Dance & Glass Eye Shadows
- Solo dance theater piece by Chris Black
- Aerial dance by Lisa Natoli
- Aerial dance + physical theatre by Sticks & Stones
Setting a Chair for Natsu
Performed by: Meshi Chavez
Live Music by: Lisa DeGrace
Description:
In sacred ceremony, we set a chair for those who’ve passed—adorning it with memory, gesture, and belonging. This solo is a gesture of that kind. Created in honor of Natsu Nakajima, a pioneering force in Butoh and my master teacher, this work is a personal act of remembrance. Through stillness, weight, and breath, it asks: What remains when our elders leave us? How do we carry their light forward? A quiet offering, a wild making. A chair set in her name.
Meshi Chavez is an experienced Butoh artist, queer creator, MFA graduate from the University of the Arts and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance at Middlebury College. Trained by Natsu Nakajima and Denise Fujiwara, his work explores presence, transformation, and Queer Futurity. www.meshichavez.com
Lisa DeGrace is a sound composer who crafts immersive sonic environments from found sounds, instrumentation, and voice. Her work often explores spirit, ancestors, and transformation through collaborations with dancers and video artists. Upcoming projects include work with Nanda D’Agostino at the Peabody Essex Museum. www.studiom13.com
Outer Harbor
Created in collaboration by: Steep Horizon Dance & Glass Eye Shadows
Performed by: Cam Moreno and Alisa Javits
Description:
Outer Harbor is an aerial-shadow dance installation that amplifies, distorts, and warps the viewer’s relationship to light and gravity, offering a dreamlike deep sea exploration told in ink and watercolor.
Cam Moreno (they/them) spent over twenty years in the San Francisco Bay Area as a performing artist, aerialist, and dance teacher. With a background in modern dance, contact improvisation, and aerial arts, they were a longtime company member and previous Associate Artistic Director of the vertical dance company, BANDALOOP, performing and teaching across the U.S. as well as all over the world. Other performance highlights while on the west coast include works by Lizz Roman & Dancers, FogBeast, Flyaway Productions, Sean Dorsey Dance, Christy Funsch, and Chris Black. After moving to New York in 2022, Cam formed Steep Horizon Dance, with the aim to develop site-reactive and aerial dance in the Hudson Valley, collaborating with local dancers, musicians, and shadow artists in traditional and unconventional performance spaces.
Alisa Javits is a visual artist, writer, and fabricator. She co-founded Glass Eye Shadow Pictures in 2013, a shadow theater company whose productions run the gamut from satirical vignettes to psycho-dramatic mood poems. Alisa designs and builds sculptural shadow art, fabricates the tools necessary for the desired light and shadow effects, and steers the movement that creates the visual scenes.
Untitled
Created and Performed by: Chris Black
Description:
This as yet untitled solo uses the similar practices of humans adorning statues of saints and male bowerbirds building sculptures to attract mates as entry points to examine the role of physical objects in the quest for love and meaning.
Chris Black (she/her) is a choreographer and performer now based in the Hudson Valley after living in San Francisco for 30 years. She has made work for theaters, parks, museums, a Tokyo acting school, and a wedding, and has won numerous awards for her choreography.
Faultlines
Performed by: Lisa Natoli
Description:
Faultlines is a lost-and-found of stray characters and disrupted identities, a wild celebration of limitations and vulnerabilities, a crisscrossing of sly narratives, radical honesty, and sardonic wit.
Lisa’s work processes her unique observations about the absurdity of living everyday life in an aging body. With a long history in the professional dance world, she now employs movement, circus, cabaret, video and costuming as storytelling vehicles to challenge familiar narratives regarding art, beauty, age, injury and body politics. Her repertoire of performance pieces have proven highly adaptable to a variety of settings, including theaters, museums, community spaces and private residencies. Lisa invites her venues to inform and influence her performances, creating a synergy between movement and setting. Her work is continuously propelled forward by her insatiable desire to engage in an ongoing, penetrating conversation with culture, community and physical spaces. As both the world and her body irreparably evolve, her pieces continue to expand and deepen, allowing her to be heard, seen and understood, as she seeks to hear, see and understand in turn.
Feedback Loop
Created by: Sticks & Stones
Performed by: Nicki Miller and Benny Oyzon
Description:
Nicki Miller and Benny Oyzon will be sharing an excerpt from new work in process inspired by the work of “Active Hope” authors Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone. How do we navigate living within competing narratives of reality? This presentation will be the first offering of this creative research, feedback is welcome!
Nicki Miller and Benny Oyzon have been weaving aerial dance and theatrical performance since 2017. Nicki Miller (she/her) is an interdisciplinary theatre maker, aerial artist, writer, and movement educator. She was artistic director of Only Child Aerial Theatre (2014-2021). She is also an aerial coach and choreographer for theatre and opera. Benny Oyzon (he/him) is an artist and civil engineer with 20+ years experience as an aerial acrobat, aerial rigger (on and off Broadway), martial artist, dancer, fire performer, and Pilates instructor. He is continually creating different ways to find the beauty in nature and the magic in physics.
Performance Location
WildHeart is located on 46+ beautiful acres in the Hudson Valley at 183 East Road, Wallkill, NY. This event will take place in the Barn, the large building at the end of the driveway. You can park in either of the two parking areas on the right side of the driveway before you get to the Barn. There are also a few spots in front of the Barn. More info about directions and transportation options HERE.
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Refund Policy
- No refunds, no transfers