A Meal – Work In Progress

Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya are a Colombian and Japanese multidisciplinary artist duo. Their collaborative works manifest as live installations, dance and theater performances, operas, and sculptures that are presented in theaters, museums, galleries, and public spaces. Alongside their performative work, Ximena and Shige also invest their energy in critical research, printed and digital publications, and community projects. Shige and Ximena are the co-founders and artistic directors of LEIMAY and the LEIMAY Ensemble. The word LEIMAY is a Japanese term symbolizing the changing moment between darkness and the light of dawn, or the transition from one era to the other. Ximena and Shige work out of their home studio CAVE, which is located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Garnica and Moriya are Creative Capital, National Dance Project, National Endowment for the Arts and Café Royal Cultural Foundation Award recipients, and Watermill Center and Chelsea Factory Artists in Residence. Garnica received the Van Lier Fellowship for extraordinary stage directors and was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California, Riverside. She has been on the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Marymount Manhattan College and Sarah Lawrence College. Garnica and Moriya have been nominated for The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts and a United States Artists Fellowship. Her article ‘LEIMAY, CAVE, and the New York Butoh Festival’ was recently published in The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance. Ximena and Shige's work is rooted in questions of being, perception, interdependency and coexistence. They look to expose the multiplicity of spatial and temporal intervals that exist within the body, between materials and environments. They are curious about what emerges when the stability of habits, affirmation of binaries, social norm expectations, and the crystallization of identity dissolve and expose the potentialities of being.