Cathy Weis Projects will present two Sundays on Broadway in December. The evenings will feature new and ongoing works by choreographers Scott Heron, Daniel Lepkoff and Sakura Shimada, Jodi Melnick with Maya Lee-Parritz, Anat Shamgar and Cathy Weis. Both events begin at 6 p.m. Suggested donation of $10 at the door. WeisAcres is located at 537 Broadway, #3 (between Prince and Spring Streets), in Manhattan. For more information on Sundays on Broadway, including WeisAcres’ COVID-19 policies, visit www.cathyweis.org.
Choreographer and videographer Cathy Weis launched Sundays on Broadway in May 2014. This unique series of performances, film screenings, readings and discussions serves as a gathering place for artists to perform and discuss their work and their experiences. process with the public. in the intimate setting of Weis’ SoHo loft. Since its inception, the series has featured the work of over 130 choreographers, filmmakers, performers and visual artists.
Sunday, December 4
Scott Heron will present his current work Study for a Clown Show. He writes: “Everything supports me even if I don’t know how or why. You immerse yourself in innocence. Try to do everything a little longer.”
Daniel Lepkoff and Sakura Shimada will present Body of Work: Closer to Home. Since the start of the pandemic, the artists have stopped traveling and teaching and have been dancing in their living room, in their house, in a forest, at the end of Old County Road in West Halifax, VT. They met on Zoom with friends from Detroit, Northampton and Argentina, twice a week for two years. They spend two hours in their dance studio every Wednesday and Friday. They write: “Our work has not changed. We are still playing, learning and looking for the presence of the imagination in the body, the reflexes of the body, the permanent spontaneous dialogue with the environment. What is new is is that everything has come closer to home.”
In 2014, Julie Martin was the first artist to present the work Nine Evenings as part of Sundays on Broadway. Nine years later, hundreds of artists have presented their work at WeisAcres. Cathy Weis brings her own work to this bustling downtown scene with her new creation, Props from Poughkeepsie: Hunger and Restraint, the first in a series of works that bring Jim Fawcett’s props to life. Performers: Emily Climer, David Guzman and Martita Abril.
sunday december 11
Jodi Melnick and Maya Lee-Parritz showcase the debut of their first collaborative duo, Agua Viva, midway through. Dedicated to a practice of movement, the body dancing on a daily basis, this study of movement aims to capture the present, the poisonous, the complex, the meditative, the mystical, the spontaneous and the broken.
SOLO, by Anat Shamgar, is part of a recent body of work called Plateau Stories, created in collaboration with sound artist, musician and performer Tom Soloveitzik. In all of these works, Shamgar deals with time as space, movement as thought, and sound as matter. The artists share a passion for silence, the aesthetics of reduction and the practice of mindfulness. The separation between sound and image serves as a starting point for the goal of creating a state of separate being and living together in harmony, a multi-layered space for how we color echoes or vibrate in the presence of the other, becomes a partner in a “one” journey.
Cathy Weis will present Props from Poughkeepsie: Vials of Remorse performed with Scott Heron. Heron and Weis will spend a week together at the WeisAcres studio and then show off what they’ve been up to. Vials of Remorse is a later chapter in the Props from Poughkeepsie series, which brings props created by Jim Fawcett to life.
Scott Heron came across Deborah Hay in 1983 in Austin and has since evolved as a performer, collaborator and creator. He worked in New York in the 1980s and 1990s, lived in a queer community in Tennessee for several years after that, and now lives in New Orleans.
Daniel Lepkoff has been moving for 72 years. In 1970 he began to call this dance.
Jodi Melnick spends time with the movement every day, whether it’s in a studio, elevator, hallway, or whatever space is available. Currently, she continues to be in dance conversations, in and out of the studio with Sara Rudner, Vicky Shick, Jon Kinzel, David Neumann, Charlie Atlas, Rashaun Mitchell, Silas Reiner, Paul Kaiser, Liz Roche, and is currently collaborating with Maya Lee Parritz.
Anat Shamgar is a dancer and dance maker based in Jerusalem. She is an active performer of solo works and collaborations. Collaborations with sound artists and others invite to discover “the other”, to merge languages and to find the coexistence of differences. Shamgar has performed at Montpelier Dance Festival, Podevil Festival in Berlin, New York Improvisation Festival, Israel Festival, Room Dance Festival and many other festivals and venues. She has been a faculty member of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance since 1991 and directs the choreography program and movement department.
Sakura Shimada lives in West Halifax, VT, with Daniel Lepkoff. She likes to research the functions of human body and life in country life, such as gardening, walking, swimming, skiing, dancing, meditation, animal watching, Feldenkrais lessons. She is a Feldenkrais practitioner.
Tom Soloveitzik is a Tel Aviv-based musician and sound artist. He co-directs the Holon Scratch Orchestra and has been, for the past decade, co-artistic director of the Musica Nova Ensemble for experimental music.
Cathy Weis is a dancer, choreographer, videographer and artistic director of Cathy Weis Projects. In high school, Weis was a soloist with the Louisville Ballet. After graduating from college, she played in a cello quartet in Europe, tap-danced the streets of San Francisco, and had a stint as a disco queen. Moving to New York in 1983, Weis developed a signature blend of live performance and video. In 1996 she received a Bessie Award for her creative work and in 2002 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In addition to her artistic practice, she runs Sundays on Broadway, a showcase for choreographers and performance artists.