Steady Pulse, Brendan Fernandes at Recess

"On July 13, Brendan Fernandes will begin work on Steady Pulse, a project that will transform Recess into a club that plays host to a diverse range of happenings and interventions, including performances, movement workshops, conversations, and dance parties. At the center of the club will be an architectural and sculptural dance floor, which will shift appearance and function as it acts as a platform for the varied events. Across the project’s interlocking elements, Fernandes will investigate the valences of the dance floor as a queer space that is variously safe and unsafe—a site for joy and fear, release and reflection.

During the Session, Fernandes will stage his dance performance Free Fall—which includes dancers falling at intervals when the accompanying music stops—as a means of exploring the dance floor as a support for the upright body that simultaneously carries the power to impact, damage, and ultimately hold still the bodies that fall onto it. As a complement to this piece, Fernandes will develop a new performance at Recess called Hit Back. Through open rehearsals with dancers and invitations to visitors to engage with choreography through a graphic score, Hit Back will take shape as a meditation on the agency of movement. The Session’s discursive programs and evening events will address the topic of how states of emergency or aggression can be reframed as moments of action. To this end, an “Emergency Rave” dance party will feature a siren-like lighting installation, suggesting that in the face of urgent conditions, dance can offer one form of cathartic release."

- https://www.recessart.org/brendanfernandes/

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