BODY WASH
A series of exploratory performance art workshops
curated by Maya Rubio
BODY WASH: PERFORMANCE ART WORKSHOPS
This four-part series curated by Maya Rubio connected us with unique experiences led by artists from across New England. Participants of all experience levels were guided through exploratory performance art workshops. Together, we moved through questions around wayfinding, technology, and embodied storytelling in order to discover more expansive ways of being.
Feel art pulsing through your body. This is performance. By magnifying gestures and spatial relations, your body-in-performance becomes a medium for storytelling and meaning making. Bodies hold memory and knowledge; performance translates something that can’t be said in words. Tap into the sensational. Let it wash over you.
Surface Tension
Sunday, May 28, 2023 • 12pm
Katherine Mitchell Di Rico uses drawing, sculpture, light, and sound elements to create multimedia installations that investigate how we negotiate connectivity and sense perception in today’s networked world. How do screens perform as a site of negotiation between the body, the material, and the virtual? What is real, and what is apparent, and how might the body move through space and time at that threshold- to question our notions of reality? During this one-hour performance workshop, participants will generate work using their personal devices, their bodies, and props brought by the workshop facilitator to engage these questions.
Standing, Sitting, Sleeping:
Pedestrian Movement Workshop
Sunday, June 4, 2023 • 12pm
Yolanda He Yang, artist focusing on public art and body movement “Standing, Sitting, Sleeping: Pedestrian Movement Workshop” explores meditative and expressive movements inspired by daily pedestrian movements. Through this workshop, participants will learn how to connect with their bodies, minds, and spirits through movement, music, and creativity. By magnifying familiar movements through performance, this workshop is designed to help participants connect with their environment, explore the rhythms of their daily life, and find joy and inspiration in everyday moments.
Dancing with Images
Sunday, June 18, 2023 • 1pm
Phoebe Hiltermann, circus artist, puppet maker, and theatrical storyteller and Livia Chesley, performer How do we come to a state of receptivity, allowing our bodies to be an open channel for our creativity, and a physical extension of our imagination? Through movement and object work, participants will engage with personal symbols and image-making in order to discover a pre- language practice of storytelling.
Map Dancing:
Cartographic Movement Workshop
Monday, June 26, 2023 • 1pm
Kelly Chen, Allston-based improviser and researcher The Map of the city is not the City. The Map is a performative regime that produces space, a tool that restricts desire, and an apparatus that governs bodies. How do we engage with the City in ways that don’t reiterate the spatial logics of the Map? What choreography governs everyday life? How do we imagine maps that are temporary, borderless, and what we need in the moment? Map Dancing is an outdoor movement workshop where participants alter and destroy physical maps and then interpret them as movement scores. Participants will move through a series of engagements with map objects, and lead the group through interpreting their scores. In this workshop, participants will engage with urban questions through movement.
Maya Rubio is an Allston-based independent curator, after-school teacher, and editor at Boston Art Review. Recent curatorial projects include “The Banquet” at Horse Room, “What’s the Secret?” at Gallery 263, and “Please Let Me In” at Boston Center for the Arts.
