Work Up puts new ideas on stage.

Work Up supports the development of emerging dance and performance artists whose work demonstrates risk, relevance, and research.This April, Work Up presents nine emerging artists on a series of three shared-bill performances, as well as an artist-generated exhibition in the Gibney Dance Gallery.

Work Up 3.2 |  effie bowen, IV Castellanos and Amanda Hunt, Veraalba Santa

effie bowen
DANCE SPORT

DANCE SPORT is an exorcism dance for the contemporary moment, pursuing exhaustion as an ecstatic state. effie aims to traverse states of endurance without climax, and utilize fatigue as a generative force. The performer’s physicality spans from deliberate disorientation to circuit training exercises, all with the goal of embodying maximal energy and effort. DANCE SPORT hosts a network of agendas, and effie aims to be relentlessly transparent while inevitably falling into states of joy, vulnerability, resilience, and tragedy.

IV Castellanos and Amanda Hunt
SurForm i & ii

Exploring the continuous catching and falling of the performers’ bodies, SurForm i & ii aims to define arrival as reciprocity. The work juxtaposes the movement quality of being held, and holding one another, with task-based work incorporating utilitarian objects cast out of plaster. Castellanos and Hunt aim to render this execution of “simple” and “everyday” tasks as possibly useless and possibly other.

Veraalba Santa
A Series of Non-Beginnings

A Series of Non-Beginnings is a solo piece and a long-distance duet between Veraalba Santa and sound artist Joel Rodriguez. The work was developed during a year long collaboration, with Santa in New York and Rodriguez in Puerto Rico. The distance provided a way for Santa to discover the limits of self-expression available to her body against a dense background of noise – history as noise, the noise of Puerto Rico, at times twisted and distorted beyond recognition. The result is a dance and soundscape that mingle and disturb each other every step of the way.

Visit gibneydance.org for more info!