Novel Formats
2024

Novel Formats #1-7 A Dialogue|The Set Up|Loop|Pile Up|Crash|You Are Here|Rider

Next up: Novel Formats #3: Loop, February 27, 2025
New Ear at The Fridman Gallery
169 Bowery, New York, NY
With dancer Julian Barnett, vocalist/sound artist, Jean Carla Rodea, electric guitarist Evan Patrick O'Reilly, and Rachel Bernsen
More info TBA
New Ear

Watch
Novel Formats #2: The Set Up
Novel Formats #1: A Dialogue
(Above:Video excerpt from A Dialogue )

Image Gallery

In life, as in performance, we think that our senses are right and true but so much is learned, habitual. Novel Formats aims to interrupt these patterns through novelty, immediacy, risk, and real time human connection.

Novel Formats is a seven-part performance cycle. Each brings together artists across multiple disciplines and in different permutations to engage with a proposed theme and minimal choreographic structures. The work is rooted in improvisation and dependent on the individual artists’ interpretation and the deliciously unpredictable dynamic of the group. It challenges each of us to stay in the continuous present, to attune to the moment with our whole selves.

Other NF collaborators so far: dancer Ellen Smith Ahern, cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, vocalist Kyoko Kitamura, visual artist Lindsay Packer, cellist Tomeka Reid, violist/ electronic artist Mac Waters


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Previous events in this series:

Novel Formats #1: A Dialogue
Feb 3, 2024
JAM - Junction Arts Media, WRJ, VT
With
Taylor Ho Bynum, cornetist, multi-instrumentalist
Kyoko Kitamura, vocalist
Lindsay Packer, visual artist
Tomeka Reid, cellist
Ellen Ahern Smith, dancer
and Rachel Bernsen

Novel Formats #2:The Set Up
October 6, 2024
JAM-Junction Arts & Media
With dancer Ellen Smith Ahern, dancer Julian Barnett, vocalist Kyoko Kitamura, violist and electronics Mac Waters, and Rachel Bernsen

It has been a very long time since I saw such excellence in collaborative, attentive improvisation. Not a moment dropped out. And a good intimate space for the audience who became part of the moment. ...my gratitude [to] all of your partners for this marvelous, luscious, creative experience. Being present with people who are paying such close attention, listening to each other, shifting the molecules in the space, slowing down the pace is revolutionary, needed.
-Hannah Dennison, audience member, choreographer and founding director of Cradle to Grave Arts, Inc.

Photo Credit: Kate Barber / Julian Barnett, Ellen Smith Ahern, Rachel Bernsen