
The NYU Artist Development Program for Dance
7 – 8:30PM
In May 2024, The NYU Production Lab announced six dance artists selected for its inaugural 2024 NYU Artist Development Program for Dance. Members of the cohort each focused on the continuation of a creative project, and on broad career growth over the 6 month program.
This inaugural group of NYU alumni dance artists represent a diverse array of dance genres and schools of study across the university.
You are invited to attend the program’s culminating showing, sharing excerpts from works in progress of the inaugural cohort:
Kristel Baldoz, Yellow Fever
Drawing from Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of ornamentalism, I engage the relationship and slippage between objecthood and personhood, and orientalism and objectification that is tied to the female Asian identity. Cheng’s concept addresses how the Asiatic woman, the “yellow” woman, is seen as an aesthetic ornament - she is viewed as an object rather than a person. Through dance, ceramics, and indictment, I investigate the choreography and movement between body and objects.
Rohan Bhargava, Baraat
“Baraat” is a multidisciplinary work of dance, music, and theater that scrutinizes the institution of marriage in India through a queer and inclusive lens. It fuses aesthetics from Bollywood cinema, Indian street-theater, Bhangra dance, and queer sexuality into one cohesive whole.
Austin Coats, Warren’s Gospel
Warren’s Gospel (gospel meaning “good news” or “good story”) is a love letter to queer black men.This testament teases the taboos and intersections of queer black identities in relationship to the black church or Christianity.
David Lee, Resonance
The performance explores the Asian American experience, addressing societal pressures, humanizing the perpetual foreigner, and celebrating queer Asian identity through contemporary, jazz and street dance (hip hop, house, waacking).
Jade Mann, Untitled Work-in-Progres
Through the carefully constructed sequencing and layering of visual and sonic material, this work-in-progress examines the role of the image: in the movement of history, its interaction with memory, its relationships with political force and spirituality, and its connection to the divine materiality of our threatened world. Working from a broad archive of historical and contemporary images, this imagery is translated into highly sculpted physical tableaus and warped idiosyncratic movement, arriving at a dense panorama of images and sounds.
Grace Yi-Li Tong, FREE RANGE YOLKY *
Created as an exploration of “facedance”, *FREE RANGE YOLKY is the solo prologue to the half-evening-length work: ZOO!, an illumination of memory, charade, and the unsaid in the Asian-American experience. Originally created in 2022, *FREE RANGE YOLKY *collages and chews on scenes from the recesses of the diasporic body, regurgitating hyperbolic movement languages of clowning, pantomime, and of course, dance.
About the NYU Production Lab
The NYU Artist Development Program for Dance is an inaugural program produced and run by the NYU Production Lab with support from the NYU Office of the Provost and the NYU Cross-Cutting Initiative on Inequality. The program is presented in partnership with the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, the Tisch Initiative for Creative Research, NYU Skirball Center, Tisch Department of Dance, The Gallatin Interdisciplinary Arts Program, and the Steinhardt Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions (MPAP) Dance Education Program.