Five Performers Demonstrate a Field is an investigation of how movement in a particular room affects a simple sound environment: specifically through Hemisphere speakers in the sanctum of the Old American Can Factory in Brooklyn. a canary torsi was invited for a residency through ISSUE’s Floating Points Program. The residency is not meant to culminate in a production but rather to explore the blurring of the line between sound and movement and to bring those investigations to an audience. Moderators will facilitate a discussion immediately following each showing. Collaborators involved in this project include: composer Benjamin Bernstein, choreographer Yanira Castro, installation designer Charles Houghton, performers Anna Garcia (trumpet), Amity Jones (dancer), Peter Lanctot (violin), Marina Libel (dancer), and Sam Silver (keyboard). Current moderators are vocalist/composer Maria Stankova (Thursday, January 12th) and choreographer Melinda Ring (Friday, January 13th).
About a canary torsi
a canary torsi create site-adaptable dance projects within visual and audio environments. Established in 2009 by New York director/choreographer Yanira Castro, a canary torsi invites audiences to engage in scenarios that are anchored around live performance and extend into other media and online platforms. These multidisciplinary arts collaborations incorporate unconventional sites and transform traditional venues. Ranging from formalist movement and immersive audio installations to fictional Twitter feeds and photographic narratives, Castro’s collaborations plunder behavior, gesture, text and sound from a multitude of sources—fiction, film, photography—to engage participants in an immediate, personal encounter with the work.
About the choreographer
Puerto Rican born and Brooklyn-based choreographer Yanira Castro collaborates with a core group of performers and designers on individual projects under the name, a canary torsi. Formed by Castro in 2009, a canary torsi develops multi-disciplinary site-adaptable performance projects, transforming traditional venues or highlighting unconventional sites, constructing scenarios to engage audiences in a personal encounter with the work. In her dances, Castro frames questions about duration, intimacy, the relationship of the audience and the performers to evolving movement material, and discovery within an open structure.
Castro’s work has been presented in New York by Dance Theater Workshop, Performance Space 122, Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), and The Chocolate Factory in spaces as varied as The Gershwin Hotel, The Invisible Dog Art Center and Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Her work has toured nationally and internationally. Her Bessie Award-winning, Dark Horse/Black Forest, was performed in the public bathrooms of the George Bacovia Theater in Romania; the Daile Theatre in Latvia and the tanzhaus in Dusseldorf, Germany for the international tanzmesse.
Castro has been recognized with various awards from The MAP Fund, NEFA’s National Dance Project, The Jerome Foundation, among others. She has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio program, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, and ArtistNe(s)t, a project developed by the Swiss Cultural Programme by Pro Helvetia and the Swiss Development Cooperation SDC in the George Apostu Cultural Center in Bacau, Romania. Castro received her B.A. in Theater & Dance and Literature from Amherst College.
About the composer
Benjamin Bernstein is a composer focused on collaboration. Since 2007, he has worked with choreographers, actors, directors, writers, and visual artists to create integrated performance installations. Recent compositions include work for solo instruments and ensembles as well as two operas, Bad Island and Patterns of Inheritance, both recipients of the J P. Adler memorial grant. His latest work. The Lost Light, premiered at the Center For Performance Research in Williamsburg with support from the Brooklyn Arts Council. Bernstein has studied and performed with Alvin Lucier, Anthony Braxton, and Andres Levin. He received his B.A. in Music and American Literature from Wesleyan University.
