A Canary Torsi, Photo by Maria Baranova
Yanira Castro | a canary torsI
AUTHOR
Interactive Installation on display June 30 - July 14
Location: Featherstone Center for the Arts
30 Featherstone Lane, Oak Bluffs
AUTHOR is presented in collaboration with Featherstone Center for the Arts, as part of its Augmented Reality Art Show.
CAST
Thursday, July 18th | 7:00pm
Saturday, July 20th | 7:00pm
Location: The Patricia N. Nanon Theater
Tickets:
$25 Adult
$15 Seniors, Students and Military
$5 Children under 12
Behind the Counter and Membership discounts apply
Funded in part by the Expeditions program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional support from the six New England state arts agencies.
“Cast”, Photo by Maria Baranova
AUTHOR/CAST
“There’s a non-zero probability that Yanira Castro is the Rube Goldberg of contemporary dance.”
- Brian Rogers for Fusebox’s Written and Spoken
AUTHOR and CAST are part of a trilogy of works that draw from a collection of audio and video recordings generated with 15 accomplished NYC performing artists, concerning the process of casting and the complexities of representation. How do we represent one another? Who represents us?
Each piece in the trilogy is a standalone work. Rearranging the relationships between audience, performer, and event, each individual work informs and expands on one another. We invite you to experience the works in any order.
AUTHOR invites each visitor to the gallery to interact with the 15 performers through a text-based computer game. Forming a poetically mediated stream-of-conscious between visitors and the text and video recordings generated by the project’s 15 performers, visitors navigate their relationship to the performers' language and images. Resulting in strangely on-point, absurd surprising exchanges, the algorithm of the game invites the author to discover their own voice inside the machine, while in "conversation" with the personal material of 15 performers.
AUTHOR originally premiered at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, NY in September 2017. More information can be found at this link.
“Author”, Photo by Simon Courchel
CAST is a performance by four of the 15 performers that created the trilogy. At each performance, a new, computer-generated script is culled from transcripts of the audio recordings that also make up AUTHOR. The performers receive the never-before-seen script in front of the audience and perform it for the first time in their presence. Upcoming performances of CAST at The Yard will take place July 18 and 20, 2019.
a canary torsi
a canary torsi’s work examines the moment of encounter between public bodies: performer and audience. The artists investigate issues that are at the foundation of performance: what brings us together, the nature of the space we inhabit, and how every aspect of our convergence is loaded with cultural, social, historical, and personal choices that inform who we are and how we form meaning. The indeterminate performative systems they develop often utilize technology as a catalyst of spontaneous structures, patterns, and instructions that charge the work with unpredictability. Ranging from immersive performance environments to responsive video installations, a canary torsi explores the relationship between spectator and event, developing scenarios where the audience’s actions dramatically impact the outcome of the work.
Yanira Castro, Artistic Director
Puerto Rican choreographer Yanira Castro is a Bessie-award-winning artist. In 2009, she formed the interdisciplinary collaborative group, a canary torsi. Castro’s work borrows from dance, performance, and visual art and often utilizes interactive technology to form hybrid works. With her collaborators she has developed over 10 projects for the stage, galleries, and non-traditional sites, ranging from video installations, performances, and text-based computer games. Currently, she is a 2018/19 New York Live Arts' Live Feed Artist, 2018 Yaddo Fellow, and Marble House Project Artist-in-Residence. She has received various awards including NYFA's Choreography Fellowship, NEFA’s National Dance Project, and a 2019 NYSCA Theater Commission.
Learn more
The creation of AUTHOR, CAST was made possible, in part, by generous commissions from the three presenting organizations: The Chocolate Factory, Abrons Art Center and The Invisible Dog Art Center.
AUTHOR, CAST was also made possible with the support of a grant from The Jerome Foundation and by New Music USA, made possible by annual program support and/or endowment gifts from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Baisley Powell Elebash Fund, Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. CAST, AUTHOR is also made possible by a canary torsi’s generous Kickstarter donors.
The development of AUTHOR, CAST was made possible, in part, by Yanira Castro’s participation in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Dance Development program and the work was developed as part of the Extended Life Dance Development program made possible in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (LMCC.net). AUTHOR, CAST was researched, developed and honed with financial, administrative and residency support from the Dance in Process program at Gibney Dance with funds provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.