Novel Formats #1-7 A Dialogue|The Set Up|Loop|Pile Up|Crash|You Are Here|Rider
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.
NF collaborators so far: dance artists Ellen Smith Ahern and Julian Barnett, cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, cinematographer Chico Eastridge, vocalist Kyoko Kitamura, visual artist Lindsay Packer, electric guitarist Evan Patrick, cellist Tomeka Reid, vocalist/electronics/sound design Jean Carla Rodea, violist/electronics Mac Waters
Watch
Novel Formats #3: Loop
Novel Formats #2: The Set Up
Novel Formats #1: A Dialogue
(Above:Video excerpt from The Set Up )
Cinematography, film editor: Chico Eastridge
Camera: Chico Eastridge, Cedar O'Dowd / for NF#3: Chico Eastridge, Devon Smith, Jr.
DONATE to support this project. Funds raised go toward artist fees and production costs. Thank you.
Novel Formats is supported in part by JAM-Junction Arts & Media, NEFA's New England Dance Fund and the generosity of individual donors.
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Previous events in this series:
Novel Formats #3: Loop
February 27, 2025 at 7pm
New Ear at The Fridman Gallery
169 Bowery, New York City
Tickets & Info
Loop regards the slack in the system. Form is stretched, unwound, emptied of its compositional parts and drawn out as far the structure will allow before releasing it to re-form as itself. Loop is dance artist Julian Barnett, electric guitarist Evan Patrick, vocalist and interdisciplinary artist Jean Carla Rodea, and myself. With lighting by Chico Eastridge.
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
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
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