Festival

The 2024 Movement Research Festival is curated by Marýa Wethers, Director of the GPS/Global Practice Sharing program at Movement Research, with a focus on the artists and partnerships developed through the GPS MENA (Middle East & North Africa) Exchange program. MR Festival events, happening from February 28-March 9, 2024, include artist talks (GPS Chats and Studies Project), movement workshops, and performances at Movement Research at the Judson Church. The festival concludes with performances at Danspace Project,for the first time since 2019!

The 2024 Festival presents an exciting lineup of extraordinary and dynamic contemporary dance artists from the MENA/SWANA region. Featured artists include Salma AbdelSalam (Egypt), Sahar Damoni (Palestine), Lori Kharpoutlian (Lebanon), Charlie Prince (Lebanon), F.M. Sayna (Iran), and Noura Seif Hassanein (Egypt). These remarkable artists are shedding light on important issues of global significance, from abortion and women’s rights to exploring forced displacement, the body as archeological space, and the politics of waiting. Occurring simultaneous to the genocide of Palestinians under ongoing occupation, the 2024 Festival uplifts the creative practices and artistic work of this cohort of dance artists as a necessary and felicitous expression of the complex and contradictory realities of our lives and times. 

** All events FREE, reservations required for Artists talks, Workshops and Danspace Project performances

** No reservations are required for Movement Research at the Judson Church performances

Date: Wed, Feb 28

Time: 6:30-8:30pm

Location: MR, 122CC – Courtyard Studio

The GPS Chats series offers GPS artists and cultural producers an informal platform to discuss their work in the independent contemporary dance sector within their cultural contexts and the influence of international exchange on the development of their practices.

Lori Kharpoutlian discusses her artistic practice, exploring an “inverted” process: rather than initiating from the body outwards, how can one develop a piece from its context inwards–by building a world inspired from research and inhabiting it as a performer or an audience member. She is interested in seeing one’s practice as an excuse to enter and exit worlds, switching through ways of questioning and conceiving as a means of drawing parallels across precarious physical and digital realities.

Charlie Prince will present an overview of his artistic work and the influence of the intersections of music and choreography on his creative process. He will also discuss his process of remounting the solo Cosmic A* for the MR Festival, and the ways that revisiting the work to reflect upon and respond to shifting contexts is a form of embodied solidarity.

In her presentation, F.M. Sayna will discuss her journey as an Iranian female dancer and the conditions that dancers in Iran navigate to find spaces to learn, to teach, to practice, to perform. She considers the questions: Who is she as an Iranian choreographer and dancer? What is her essence? How can a woman work as an artist in a land in which dancing is banned and women’s bodies are controlled by society and government? How does creating and researching movement support healing of the collective and individual traumas of her dancers and dance students? She will discuss the connection between Iranian traditional folk dances and architecture and how the influences and inspirations of Iranian ancient myths inform her creative practice. And the ways she has tried to create her own path and possibilities to keep moving and learning and living.

>> Register here

Date: Thu, Feb 29

Time: 10am – 12pm

Location: MR, 122CC – Ninth Street Studio

This workshop will give participants a glimpse into nasa4nasa’s practice as a duo. Pulling from their joint repertoire and using different movement prompts, participants are invited to explore choreographic collaboration. During their two hour workshop Noura Seif and Salma Abdelsalam (nasa4nasa) will introduce key tools in their creation process: listening as a mode of movement, space as a constant collaborator, and movement exploration as a tool for language research.

(This workshop is open to all bodies, no previous dance experience required.)

>> Register here 

Date: Fri, Mar 1

Time: 10am – 12pm

Location: MR, 122CC – Ninth Street Studio

The workshop will focus on the exploration of deep listening and embodied resonance: of the self, the other, the group, and the environment. 

Through proposals that awaken the body’s energetic and imaginative landscape, we will bring to question the notions of physical experience, porosity and sharing in order to create meeting points between virtuosity and somatic attention, renewing the infinite pleasure and power of dancing. We will move through continual transformations of tactile and instinctive identities that are triggered by the expanding and trans-forming energetic glow that ‘in-forms us’: Opening up dialogue between internal and external functions of physicality, between the activation of deep fantasy and the encounter with material reality.

>> Register here

Date: Sat, Mar 2

Time: 10am – 2pm

Location: MR, 122CC – Ninth Street Studio

In the Middle East and North African regions, lemon water with mint is consumed to cleanse the body of toxins and impurities. This workshop is an opportunity to clear the head and heart in order to dive into an exploration of our personal movement language and intuitive artistic voice. The workshop combines exercises drawn from meditative, somatic, dance, and writing practices which Sahar Damoni has used to develop her choreographic work. We will use  these tools to get in touch with our bodies and ourselves and develop and react to movement material. The workshop is built on the importance of reciprocity between body and mind and the therapeutic power of movement. In this workshop, we tap into dealing with stress and trauma in the body and gain tools to manage the physical effects of these sources in our bodies and souls.  

The workshop provides participants a safe and inclusive space for dealing with sensitive issues in a personal and exploratory way through somatic and movement-based exercises. The goal is to physically empower participants to fully feel, confront, and trust their bodies and intuition on their own healing journey for empowering the me in them and move in a free way in their own bodies in their own space and out of it in the society. It is an opportunity for introspection and personal research. Together, we will listen to the whispering of our dreams and enjoy the  exploration toward reaching them.  

The workshop draws on Sahar Damoni’s experience as an Arab Palestinian woman. Facing mental and emotional challenges in Arab society on a daily basis, Damoni saw the need to build a workshop from her personal story and professional experience that can provide an outlet to the difficulties other marginalized women, non dancers, dancers, and all people endure. The workshop offers emotional, physical, and practical responses that serve as tools to emphasize the strength of the individual and the support of the group. 

(A workshop for everyone – dancers, non-dancers, general public, and artists alike) 

>> Register here

Date: Mon, Mar 4

Time: 7pm

This Movement Research at the Judson Church performance is part of the 2024 Movement Research Festival and features solo works by Lori Kharpoutlian and F.M. Sayna and culminates in a group improvisation with the Festival artists.

Lori Kharpoutlian will offer a work-in-progress presentation of “looping, loading, falling out of time” (working title). It is an excerpt from a set of musings into the politics of waiting, as it manifests in digital algorithms, economic and political strategies, and the design of everyday objects and services. Through a process of sampling and juxtaposition, formatting and reformatting, the work explores the temporal, psychological, and spatial tensions this bodily condition creates. 

F.M. Sayna will present a new short dance film about leaving your beloved land through forced immigration. This displacement is like being trapped behind walls but in a larger prison. The work honors an Afghan friend of the artist and all people who are forced to choose between leaving their homeland or staying in prisons of dictatorism.

Date: Wed, Mar 6

Time: 7 – 9pm

Location: MR, 122CC – Courtyard Studio

In this candid conversation, artists Salma AbdelSalam, Sahar Damoni, and Noura Seif Hassanein will discuss the research, practices, and questions that inform their choreographic process and performance work. In this dialogue, the artists are considering the curiosities, challenges, and implications of the political body, nationality, the shift of gaze, power dynamics, and feeling of their bodies on display when performing their work outside of the context it was conceived for. The conversation also reflects upon and questions the conditions of collaboration/creation and what possibilities can emerge when thinking beyond the scope of more established infrastructures.

>> Register here

All performances take place at Danspace Project located inside St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, 131 East 10th Street (at 2nd Avenue)

Date: Thu, Mar 7

Time: 7:30pm

NO MERCY by nasa4nasa navigates their daily virtual and non-virtual modes of feelings. During this 45-minute DJ set, nasa4nasa explores the limits of sensuality and desire and its interplay with violence. The two female bodies navigate the gaze, referencing their repertoires of body image, pop, rage and intimacy. nasa4nasa will lure you in, disarm you and in the process unravel in their own drama.

>> RSVP here

Date: Fri, Mar 8

Time: 7:30pm

Eat Banana and Drink Pills is a contemporary dance performance about abortion among single Arab Palestinian women. The work focuses on the physical and emotional experience, and the social dimensions for this experience. The work analyzes ramifications of this choice and the stigma, trauma, and social violence it carries.

“The traumatic moment engraved in the psyche is translated into an uninhibited immersion of the choreographer in the body, in a way that merges the past with the present into an unfiltered “now,” and only at the end does the understanding sharpen that this shared and exposed time with the audience holds the possibility of healing.” (Idit Suslik, Writer, The Contemporary Eye)

>> RSVP here

Date: Sat, Mar 9

Time: 7:30pm

Cosmic A* (2021), created and performed by Charlie Prince, is a 45 minute solo performance concert that observes the body as an archaeological space and engages this body in rituals of excavation – revealing new and unbound mythologies, allowing for a limitless agency of self-representation and rootedness.
Created in response to the multiple crises in Lebanon between 2019 – 2021, this new, stripped down version for the MR Festival is a meditation on the last three years, looking back, looking in and forward as a transposition of the work for a different context and time.

The body is a site of being. It is matter that is shaped, deformed, that ascends and emerges. It is a site of revolution, of oppression. Of representation and mis-representation. Of wholeness and fragmentation. It is the surface where ideas and action meet. It is the container of manifestos, of traumas, of unanswered questions and fragile answers. The body has never crystallized. It is always becoming. Over and over again.

>> Register here

Movement Research Festival finds its roots in the Improvisation Festival/New York (IF/NY), initiated in 1992 by artists Sondra Loring (an MR Artist-in-Residence at the time) and Julie Carr. In 1999 IF/NY became a program of Movement Research, under the curation of Programming Director Amanda Loulaki. In 2004, Movement Research created a guest artist curator format, and in 2006, Movement Research established the festival as a twice-annual event. This biannual, guest artist curator approach allows for a varied investigation and exploration into current artistic concerns and reflects Movement Research’s mission of valuing diverse artists’ voices, their creative process and vital role within society. The Fall Festival centers around performances at our long-time festival home, Danspace Project.