Correspondences

Oct 1-4 & Nov 6

HERE and LEIMAY present Correspondences
supported by The Village Alliance, 51 Astor Place, and Café Royal Cultural Foundation

With Correspondences, multidisciplinary artist duo Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya offer multiple entry points for spectators to engage with questions of being, interdependence, and coexistence. The human body (performer and observer), machines, natural elements, and the urban square mingle in an entangled poetic microcosm while opening inquiries into animate life and environmental ethics. In the inaugural presentation of this multi-borough project, audiences can safely engage in Manhattan’s Astor Place installation over conversation, and bear witness to daily activation periods performed by members of the LEIMAY Ensemble.

Single bodies are enclosed inside transparent chambers partially filled with sand. Bodies are donned with gas masks as they try, time and again, to rise to standing. At intervals, machines attached to the chambers trigger a blast of sand causing the performers to lose their footing, sinking them back down into the ground. This seemingly perpetual eruption repeats throughout daily performance activation periods of Correspondences, both with and without performers.

Tickets

October 1-4

Installation activation periods with performers: No ticket or RSVP is required.
Thursday 10/1: 8 pm
Friday 10/2: 12pm, 2pm, 4pm, 6pm, 8pm
Saturday 10/3: 12pm, 2pm, 4pm, 6pm, 8pm
Sunday 10/4: 12pm, 2pm, 4pm

Ancillary Actions:

Correspondences – The Audience Files
A growing oral and written interactive archive for audiences to engage with over conversation by sharing their responses to questions of being, interdependence, connectivity, and environmental ethics. QR codes located at various tables across the plaza guide audiences to participate both on-site and on-line. Correspondences – The Audience Files will be open to the public to engage for 30 days starting a week prior to the installation launch. (Launching September 21, 2020: correspondencesfiles.leimay.org)

Correspondences Talks
A conversation with guest activists, scholars, designers, and scientists to discuss what “decentering the human” means for them and how this action relates to issues of environmental ethics and social justice. (November 6, 2020)

Dancing for the Environment
In support of local and international, indigenous, and immigrant-led organizations working to create a more just world, from the Amazons to the Bronx to LEIMAY’s home neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to Correspondences inaugural site East Village, LEIMAY’s season of Movement Classes for All will culminate with a series of encore classes where 100% of proceeds will be donated to: Organización Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas de la Amazonia Colombiana, Green Worker Cooperatives, El Puente, and the Loisaida Center. (October 6 and October 10, 2020: dancingfor.leimay.org)

Correspondences On-Demand
For a limited period of time, two different art films capturing the meditative nature of Correspondences will be available for on-demand access. (October 1 to November 30: ondemand.leimay.org)

Additional Information

LEIMAY Ensemble is a group of national and international dancers and performers who create body-centered works around the principle of LUDUS, a practice that explores methods to physically condition the body of the performers and develop a sensitivity to the “in-between space.” Founded in 2012 by Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya the group took form through the creation of the Becoming Series pentalogy. The group holds a regular practice at their studio in Brooklyn where they engage in the creation of new work as well as on teaching, training, research, and distillation of years of direct transmission of embodied knowledge by Japanese Butoh pioneers, Noguchi Taiso practitioners, and Experimental Theater innovators. The current members of the LEIMAY Ensemble are Masanori Asahara, Krystel Copper, Derek DiMartini, Andrea Jones, and Mario Galeano. www.leimay.org

Correspondences was first developed at LEIMAY’s studio in South Williamsburg, with in-progress performances at the Watermill Center in the summer of 2019.

LEIMAY would like to acknowledge the participation of the following performers in the initial development phase of Correspondences: Alessandro Anglani, Krystel Copper, Derek DiMartini, Nini Dongnier, Thanos Fryda, Andrea Jones, Suhwa Kim, and Sorin Prodea.

HERE and LEIMAY pay respect to the Lenape ancestors past, present, and future. We acknowledge that Correspondences is situated on Munsee Lenape homeland.

Sculptural Installation Performance by
Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya
Performed by the LEIMAY Ensemble:
Masanori Asahara, Ricardo Bustamante*, Krystel Copper, Ximena Garnica, and Brandon Perdomo* (performance), Jeremy D. Slater (sound composition), Irena Romendik (costume fabrication)
*Guest Performers

Ximena Garnica & Shige Moriya | LEIMAY

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.