Choreographer, artist and educator Ilya Vidrin and the New Museum’s Department of Education and Public Engagement present the world premiere of More or Less, a meditative performance investigating social responsibility and communal care. Performances will take place on September 9 at 7pm, and September 10 at 4pm and 7pm, at the New Museum in NYC, and will serve as the culmination of the 2022 New Museum Artist Residency “Ilya Vidrin: Everything You Do Matters, No Matter What You Do.”
More or Less is a formal inquiry on partnering. Moving fluidly from dyads to solo to group work, the performers investigate relationships as they deliberately encounter one another, the floor, light and sound in the Museum’s white box theater. Drawing on questions of duty, agency and consent, the performers negotiate gestural loops and layers to illuminate an emergent logic of care. The main content of the evening is composed of Vidrin’s “partnering studies” – loopable relational exercises that constrain movement to invite generative relational awareness. Vidrin will be joined in performance with collaborators Eric Seligman (trumpet, vocals, electronics), Mel Hsu (cello, vocals, electronics), and movement artists Jessi Stegall, Cameron Surh, Valeria Solomonoff and Niki Farahani.
The partnering studies seek to trouble the idea that partners can maintain their interaction merely by executing the right moves at the right time, where quality of action and reason for action remain unspecified. The kinesthetic constraints of each study make it difficult for partners to fail to attend to the relevant features of quality or simply not care about how the movement itself was executed – moving beyond simply executing the right movement at the right time. The studies render salient every moment of inattention or insensitivity, providing a compelling framework by which to explore embodied care. For care to be exercised in its fullest sense in this work, each partner needs to understand the potential for risk and willingly trust in understanding of that risk.
For more information, visit www.newmuseum.org/residencies/ilya-vidrin-everything-you-do-matters-no-matter-what-you-do.
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