New Look. Same BRIC.

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New Look. Same BRIC.

BRIClab 2020/2021 Video Art Cohort artists: Adrienne Westwood and Angélica NegrónBecky BaumwollDarian DauchanDiane Exavier and Dominique RiderMaria Bauman-MoralesModesto “Flako” Jimenez and Brisa Areli MuñozElizabeth Thys, Mia Rovegno, and Tahir Karmali | Parijat Desai 


Adrienne Westwood (she/her) and Angélica Negrón (she/her/ella)


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Adrienne Westwood is a Brooklyn-based dance artist whose multi-layered work incorporates objects into embodied explorations of memory, bringing traces of other times and places into the present moment. Her work has been presented widely in NYC and at Jacob's Pillow, CCN-Ballet de Lorraine (France), WUK (Vienna), The Firkin Crane (Ireland), and The Philly Fringe Festival. She was a 2018-19 CUNY Dance Initiative Space Grant recipient, in partnership with Snug Harbor on Staten Island, where her evening-length "s o u n d i n g line " was developed and presented in the Historic Gardener's Cottage in 2019; it was described as “an evocative new multimedia dance performance” (BroadwayWorld.com).

Her work has also been called “a finely crafted progression” (Lisa Kraus, The Philadelphia Inquirer) and noted for its “precision, attention to detail and unspecific but tangible sense of the barely remembered” (Andy Horwitz, Culturebot). She has had extensive residencies at One Arm Red in DUMBO, and the pilot Parent-Artist Space Grant from Brooklyn Arts Exchange, through which she developed her evening-length work “Record.” From 2011-2018, she served on the selection committee for “The Bessie” NY Dance and Performance Awards on the Current Practices subcommittee. She holds an MFA from Hollins University/the American Dance Festival where she studied under the close mentorship of Donna Faye Burchfield.

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Puerto Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Angélica Negrón writes music for accordions, robotic instruments, toys and electronics as well as for chamber ensembles, orchestras and choir. Her music has been described as “wistfully idiosyncratic and contemplative” (WQXR/Q2) while The New York Times noted her “capacity to surprise.” Negrón has been commissioned by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, loadbang, MATA Festival, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Sō Percussion, the American Composers Orchestra and the New York Botanical Garden, among others. Upcoming premieres include works for the LA Philharmonic, Dallas Symphony Orchestra and National Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Girls Chorus and the NY Philharmonic Project 19 initiative. She continues to perform and compose for film as well as with her tropical indie band Balún.

Project title: [ ] (work-in-progress)

Billing: 

  • Choreographer: Adrienne Westwood
  • Composer: Angélica Negrón

Mentor: Tatyana Tenenbaum

Project description: 

[ ] is a corporeal and sonic exploration into histories of womxn ancestors created by choreographer Adrienne Westwood and composer Angélica Negrón. Together with five performers, they create an embodied exploration of untold and imagined histories. Weaving throughout a musical sculpture, the group uses performance’s hyper-attentive care to call in and hold experiences of private and personal memories of family lore, real and imagined histories, and womxn’s visible/invisible labor, ultimately asking “what is long ago, but still right now?”

View the project's event page here

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Becky Baumwoll (she/her)
 

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Becky Baumwoll (Company Member, Artistic Director) has performed with words regionally, off-Broadway, and in projects with Amios, Paper Canoe, and Ozet. She has directed with Opera On Tap, the Parsnip Ship, and Red Lab Productions. Becky graduated Tufts University magna cum laude with a degree in International Relations and a Studio Art minor. She teaches with Broken Box and is part-time adjunct faculty at The New School’s College of Performing Arts, teaching Physical Storytelling and Body Languages to undergraduates. Becky is a teaching artist with ASTEP and the IRC. 

Project title: Body/Language (work-in-progress)

Billing: 

  • Artistic Director, Broken Box Mime: Becky Baumwoll
  • Company Members, Broken Box Mime: Nick Abeel, Blake Habermann, Regan Sims, Duane Cooper, David Jenkins, Tasha Milkman, Joél Pérez, Marissa Molnar, Matt Zambrano, Géraldine Dulex, Dinah Berkeley, Esti Bernstein, Jamie Roderick, Ismael Castillo, Joshua Wynter, Leah Wagner Leonard

Mentor: Alexandria Wailes

Project description: 

BODY/LANGUAGE (work-in-progress) explores the communicative capacity of the body through playing and plays, developed and performed by an ensemble of BKBX mimes, live musicians, and ASL-using artists. Working as a collective, they create a one-act work of performance composed of several short-form narratives which, individually and as a whole, explore the capacity of the body to communicate. Some break the fourth wall and/or expose the investigative process of translation between our mediums, and some are in BKBX’s more narrative style, featuring actors within an imagined scene, scenario, or abstracted metaphorical space. BODY/LANGUAGE is the culmination of a rich investigative process that crosses disciplines and movement languages. 

View the project's event page here

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Darian Dauchan (he/him)
 

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Darian Dauchan is an award winning actor, writer, and musician who has appeared on both Broadway and Off Broadway theatre. He is the 2016 Loop Station Vice Champion of the American Beatbox Championships, a finalist for the 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship and more recently completed The Brobot Johnson Project, an Afrofuturism, Sci-Fi Hip Hop transmedia piece. The web series The New Adventures of Brobot Johnson won for Outstanding Comedy Series at the 2017 LA Web Festival, BEST soundtrack at the 2017 Escape Velocity Festival sponsored by the Museum of Science Fiction, and BEST editing at the 2018 Independent Television Festival. The album "Brobot Johnson: Bionic Boom Bap" is now available on iTunes, and the show The Brobot Johnson Experience is a Howard Gilman Foundation Grantee and critically acclaimed Ben Brantley New York Times Critics' Pick.

Project title: The Brobot Adventure: Wrath of the Wackness (work-in-progress)

Billing: 

  • Writer/Composer/Performer: Darian Dauchan 
  • Director: Andrew J. Scoville 
  • Featuring: Darian Dauchan, Toni Blackman, Ben Holbrook, Eric Lockley and Cristina Pitter
  • Video Designers: Sadah Espii Proctor and Brian Pacelli
  • Lighting Designer: Sarah Johnston
  • Props Designer: Casey Alexander Smith
  • Costume Designer: Asa Benally
  • Audio Engineer: Ray Archie
  • OBS Programming: Crystal Arnette
  • Co-Producer: Poetic Theater Productions
  • Development support provided by the CRITICAL BREAKS Residency Program at Hi-ARTS

Mentor: Roger Guenveur Smith

Project description: 

The Brobot Adventure (work-in progress) is the follow up show to The Brobot Johnson Experience, where an alien Hip Hop android named Flobot Owens, travels through space and time to help humans be better humans. In Wrath of the Wackness, Flobot Owens, legendary Brobot MC, returns to “abduct” an audience of humans from Earth for a Sci-Fi Hip Hop dance party to eradicate the wackness that’s slowly plaguing his planet. The piece includes intricate live looping that combines verses with beatboxing, vocal melodies, and sound effects while mixing socially conscious lyrics in the genres of Hip Hop, Afrofuturism, and Afrobeat.

View the project's event page here

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Diane Exavier (she/her) and Dominique Rider (they/them)
 

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Diane Exavier is a Brooklyn-based writer, theatermaker, and educator who creates performances, public programs, and games that invite audiences to participate in a theater that rejects passive reception. With a point of departure located in Caribbean Diaspora, Diane explores what she calls the 4L’s: love, loss, legacy, and land. Intersecting performance and poetry, her work has been presented at Haiti Cultural Exchange, Sibiu's International Theater Festival in Romania, Bowery Poetry Club, Dixon Place, and more. Her writing appears in The Atlas Review and The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, amongst other publications. Her play Good Blood received a 2017 Kilroys List Honorable Mention.

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Dominique Rider is a director and dramaturg based in Brooklyn, New York. They believe in l[i/o]ving like it is the end of the world. Dominique’s work is concerned with answering the question: “What is a world unmade by slavery?” They have worked as a director, assistant, and collaborator at Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Haiti Cultural Exchange, MCC, The Old Globe, The Lark, Soho Rep, The Atlantic, The Bushwick Starr, Clubbed Thumb, Long Wharf, Flux Theatre Ensemble, WP, The Movement Theatre Company, and The Black Lady Theatre. They are the director in residence for the National Black Theatre through 2021, a NAMT 2019 observer, an inaugural member of Roundabout Theatre Company’s Directing Group, as well as an inaugural member of Mabou Mines’ Maker program.

Project title: Bernarda’s Daughters (work-in-progress)

Billing: 

  • Writer: Diane Exavier
  • Director: Dominique Rider

Mentor: Sharon Bridgforth

Project description: 

For her BRIClab residency, Diane Exavier worked with director Dominique Rider and other collaborators to interrogate where grief resides in our bodies, in our sounds, in the streets we traverse daily. How does grief make survival possible? How do we live with grief in this city that has absorbed and witnessed the mourning of its countless inhabitants? And what else does grief open up to? Bernarda’s Daughters explores these questions in a variety of storytelling modes. A growing archive of the play's experiments and iterations can be found at www.bernardasdaughters.club. This work-in-progress was shared at BRIClab in anticipation of a full length audio play presentation as part of Off Stage at The New Group, a new venture featuring theatrical expressions in different media.

View the project's event page here

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Maria Bauman-Morales (she/her)

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Maria Bauman-Morales is a “Bessie” award winning multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer based in Brooklyn, NY. She is a 2020 Columbia College Dance Center Practitioner-in-Residence, 2019 Gibney Dance in Process residency award winner, 2018-20 UBW Choreographic Center Fellow, 2017-19 Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange and was the 2017 Community Action Artist in Residence at Gibney. In 2009 she founded MBDance which recently premiered (re)Source to sold-out audiences, co-commissioned by the Chocolate Factory Theater and BAAD! She creates bold and intimate artworks for MBDance, via dream-mapping and nuanced, powerful physicality. Centering non-linear stories, bodies and musings of queer people of color, she draws on her studies of English literature, capoeira, improvisation, dancing in nightclubs and concert dance classes to emphasize ancestors, imagination, and Spirit while embodying inter- dependence.

Project title: Desire: A Sankofa Dream

Billing: 

  • Creator/Director: Maria Bauman-Morales
  • Dramaturge: Sharon Bridgforth

Mentor: Lauren Ruffin

Project description: 

As part of this BRIClab residency, creator Maria Bauman-Morales shared Behind-the-Scenes Process for Desire: A Sankofa Dream, a two-day conversation series with Roger Q. Mason, Okwui Okpokwasili, and herself. 

Rather than rehearsing set choreography, the MBDance team is engaged in text-based, sensation-based, and movement-based technologies that will help them meet the moment of performance-ritual in real time. This series featured behind-the-scenes glimpses into their process as well as a public conversation between Bauman-Morales, Okpokwasili, and Mason about themes from the process and the emerging artwork Desire: A Sankofa Dream (DESIRE)

DESIRE is a multi-disciplinary, non-proscenium and site-responsive artwork centered on imagination and consent as mechanisms of Black Queer survival which must be practiced rigorously. Bauman-Morales is working with collaborators Angie Pittman and Courtney Cook, focusing on three major themes: agency in the time of fascism, Black queer desire, and humans sharing site-responsive digital commons.

View the project's event page here

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Modesto “Flako” Jimenez (he/him) and Brisa Areli Muñoz (she/her)

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Modesto Flako Jimenez is a Bushwick-raised artist and educator. 2015 HOLA Best Ensemble Award Winner. ATI Best Actor Award Winner 2016. HOLA Outstanding Solo Performer 2017, 2016 Princess Grace Honorarium in Theater, and NY Times profiled. He has taught theater/poetry in NYC Public Schools for ten years. He has toured internationally and appeared on TEDxBushwick, EARLY SHAKER SPIRITUALS (Wooster Group), Richard Maxwell’s SAMARA (Soho Rep.), Kaneza Schaal’s JACK &. (BAM) and Victor Morales' ESPERENTO (Sundance). In 2018 he became the first Dominican-American Lead Artist in The Public Theater’s UTR Festival for ¡OYE! FOR MY DEAR BROOKLYN

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Brisa Areli Muñoz is a chicanx theatre director, educator, and cultural worker based out of Brooklyn, New York. She serves as the Artistic Director of Applied Theatre Collective, where she has facilitated work both nationally and internationally, including work with peacebuilding educators in Iraq, and international mediators in Romania. Brisa has directed and facilitated work for the NYC Department of Education, Actionplay, The Public Theater, New York City Center, The Civilians, Carnegie Hall, BRIC, Sojourn Theatre, CUNY Creative Arts Team, Hi-ARTS, Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, New York City Children’s Theater, Vital Theatre, and Atlantic Pacific Theatre. Most recently, Brisa served as Manager of Community Partnerships for the Public Works program at The Public Theater.

Project title: Mercedes (work-in-progress)

Billing: 

  • Creator/Artist: Flako Jimenez
  • Director: Brisa Areli Muñoz
  • Projection Designer: Victor Morales
  • Production Manager: Carol Almonte
  • Director of Photography: Skye Morse-Hodsgon
  • Assistant Director: Cricket Brown

Mentor: Papoleto Meléndez

Project description: 

Mercedes (work-in-progress) is a multidisciplinary work inspired by Modesto "Flako" Jimenez’s mother Margarita and grandmother Mercedes, and the legacy of Latinx individuals she helped migrate to the country. After immigrating to America as a kid, Flako was raised by his grandmother in Brooklyn. Now as an adult, he serves as her main caregiver as she battles dementia. In the process of taking care of his “mama," he uncovered years of letters, receipts, and papers that documented her impact on the Latinx community.

For years, she helped individuals immigrate to the US and gain their footing in the city. Her impact was far larger than he ever knew, and yet, today very little of that sacrifice is acknowledged. Then in 2019 his Mother Margarita came from the Dominican Republic and worlds collided. Mercedes is a new multidisciplinary theatrical work in which we explore our relationship to the matriarchy and our ancestors, familial bonds and inherited trauma, and how our own identity can impact our mental health.

View the project's event page here.


Elizabeth Thys (she/her), Mia Rovegno (she/her), and Tahir Karmali (he/him)
 

Tahir Carl KarmaliMia Rovegno, and Elizabeth Thys collaborate as ThoughtThought, a collective merging our contemporary art and social practices in performance, visual art and creative entrepreneurship. We ask questions that critically consider the crumbling paradigm. We are curious and serious about creative disruptions. ELEVATOR is our first collaboration.

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Elizabeth Thys is a Business Design Lead at IDEO, a global design and innovation consultancy. She was a founder of limeSHIFT, a creative agency that aligns people, place and purpose, that emerged from MIT through a collaboration between Sloan School of Management and Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Thys, an art and technology entrepreneur, researches the intersection of the two fields, and was a 2015 Winner of Made in NY Media Center’s Entrepreneur Innovation Grant. Her work is published with The Americans for the Arts and in the Journal of Public Space. She holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering, magna cum laude, from Tufts University and MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management, where she was a Dean's Fellow and co-chair of Hacking Arts.

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Mia Rovegno is a Brooklyn-based playwright/director of experimental, investigative and immersive performance works. Her production of The Way They Live (The Civilians) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art was featured in The New Yorker’s Favorite Cultural Moments of 2015. Her  site-specific production of Miami Motel Stories was named in Vogue Magazine’s Cultural Guide to Avoiding Art Basel and Inphantry’s Best Activations at Art Basel & Miami Art Week 2018. Mia was Assistant Director for Time Stands Still on Broadway and Associate Director for the acclaimed immersive Sweeney Todd (Barrow St Theater) and The Tenant (Woodshed). Mia has directed new work for Playwrights Horizons, The New Group, Soho Rep, St. Anne’s Warehouse, WP Theater, NYTW, INTAR, Ars Nova, Clubbed Thumb, NYSAF, Labyrinth, Bushwick Starr, JACK, EST, Partial Comfort, The Amoralists, and Prelude Festival. Recipient: 2 Drama League Directing Fellowships (Theater & Film/TV), MacDowell Fellowship, NYSCA Grant, New Georges Audrey Residency, P73 Yale Residency, Berkeley Rep Ground Floor, and MTC’s Alper Fellowship. Alum: Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, Civilians R&D Group, The Jam, WP Theater Lab, Lincoln Center Directors Lab, St Ann’s Puppet Lab. Mia received her BS in Performance Studies from Northwestern and MFA in Directing from Brown, and is faculty of NYU Tisch’s ITP, Playwrights Horizons Theater School and Production & Design Studio. 

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Tahir Carl Karmali, born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, is a Brooklyn-based conceptual and visual installation artist. He received his Masters in Photography at the School of Visual Arts. Karmali’s practice concentrates on critiquing and expressing the ramifications of technology, economic structures, and neo-colonialism. Karmali has exhibited in Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; Kunsthal, Rotterdam; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn; Brooklyn College Library, Brooklyn; United Photo Industries, Brooklyn; and Circle Art, Nairobi. He has done residencies at MacDowell, Triangle Arts Association, BRIC, Pioneer Works and Trestle. Karmali is faculty of the Brooklyn College Sculpture Department.

Project title: ELEVATOR

Billing:

  • Conceptual Artist: Tahir Carl Karmali
  • Playwright/Director: Mia Rovegno
  • Pitchwriting Dramaturg: Elizabeth Thys
  • Editor: Tyler Jensen
  • Sound Designer: Roman Chimienti
  • Cast: Starr Busby, Daniel K. Isaac, Ben Beckley

Mentor: Alex Poots

Project description: 

A tech start-up company is pitching a product proposal for a “human upgrade” to a panel of venture capitalists. As the pitch unfolds, a surreal hall of mirrors emerges, escalating into a visual and sonic choral cacophony unveiling the gendered, racialized lens of the white cis male dominating the tech world, whose performative optics claim "client-facing" diversity and inclusion. ELEVATOR reveals how “the pitch” promotes the morphing of personhood and product, pushing the viewer to question the ethics of creation.

ELEVATOR draws from our experiences as artists and entrepreneurs who are continually asked to engage with the ritual of pitching. This work examines the start of the entrepreneurial journey as an entry to our capitalist system, which not only influences how we run businesses, but also how we live our lives and structure our communities. The performance explores tech start-up culture for its underlying inequities and embodiment of capitalist extremes - idealism, competition, and ego. In our COVID reality, our dependence upon technology has accelerated exponentially, elevating the privilege and inequity of the tech industry, leaving us unaware of how deeply this culture influences and surveils our lives without our knowledge or permission.

View the project's event page here

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Parijat Desai (she/her)

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India-born, U.S.-raised Parijat Desai creates hybrids of contemporary, Indian classical and Gujarati folk dance; theater; and other forms to challenge ideas of cultural purity and fear that underlie nationalism and xenophobia. Parijat’s work has been presented internationally at venues including PioneerWorks, Brooklyn; La MaMa, 92Y, and Queens Museum, all NY; Skirball Cultural Center, California Plaza, and J. Paul Getty Center, all Los Angeles; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Denver Art Museum; The Dance Centre, Vancouver; and National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai. Parijat received commissions from Danspace Project and Harlem Stage, and was an artist-in-residence with the Gibney Moving Toward Justice Cohort, CUNY Dance Initiative, and Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts. Parijat won a Lester Horton Dance Award for Performance and Chhaya Arts and Activism Award.

Project title: How Do I Become WE

Billing: 

  • Creator/Director: Parijat Desai
  • Guitar/Collaborator: Rez Abbasi
  • Vocal/Collaborator: Foram Shah
  • Percussion and Flute/Collaborator: Fumi Tanakadate
  • Percussion/Collaborator: Philip Mayer
  • Sarangi/Collaborator: Rohan Misra
  • Sound Design/Collaborator: Stephan Moore

Mentor: Dohee Lee

Project description: 

How Do I Become WE is a contemporary lok katha, or story enacted inside a participatory ritual. Following an opening ceremony acknowledging our ancestors, a dance drama unfolds: A woman has a story inside, but no one to tell—and her body grows heavy under the weight of her unspoken sadness. How will she release her story? What happens when her inner self comes out, and she shares her burden?

How Do I Become WE explores the relationship between our inner spaces and outward action, between individual and collective well-being, between struggle and magic. This multidisciplinary happening unfolds in a non-proscenium space that allows audiences to change position, and to participate. Choreography, based on a Kannada folk tale collected by noted scholar/poet A. K. Ramanujan, draws on garba (Gujarati/Indian circle dance), bharata natyam, contemporary dance, and influences from martial arts and experimental theater. The music and sound score blends elements of Gujarati, Carnatic, Japanese, and contemporary elements. Choreographer Parijat Desai and her collaborators used her BRIC residency to develop a draft of the music/sound score for How Do I Become WE.

View the project's event page here

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