Cancelled
Wednesday September 20th at 8pm, ISSUE presents the dance world's favorite doppelgangers, Benedict Nguyễn and Anh Vo, in their first-ever collaborative performance as part of ISSUE Project Room's 2023 Fall Season. This year marks the 20th Anniversary of ISSUE and will be celebrated with a series of commissioned programs, orbiting around our annual Gala and affiliated Benefit events. As part of these celebrations, ISSUE invites past Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellows (SFCF) to perform and present work on programs in collaboration with important members of the community who inspire their practice. In 2019, as ISSUE Project Room’s SFCF, Benedict Nguyễn curated “soft bodies in hard places,” a series of trans-disciplinary events circling planetary events over the 2019 season. Nguyễn returns to ISSUE this season to perform her own work alongside fellow dancer and writer Vo.
Featuring artists from across our history as well as new projects, ISSUE’s 20th Anniversary presents an opportunity to celebrate and support the organization as we continue an ambitious calendar of programming. Since its inception in 2003 under the vision of late Founder Suzanne Fiol, ISSUE has evolved from a small East Village garage, to a grain silo on the Gowanus Canal, to a project space in The Old American Can Factory, to now owning our 22 Boerum Place theater as an internationally-recognized leader for fostering experimental cross-disciplinary performance.
Across 20 years of programming, ISSUE has sustained a thriving Artists-In-Residence program, encouraging generations of NYC-based artists to take creative risks in reaching the next stage of their artistic development. ISSUE has also inaugurated the Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship, assisting emerging curators to realize ambitious new projects. The organization has bolstered close partnerships within NYC’s cultural ecology, collaborating with like minded nonprofits, galleries, theaters, and non-traditional spaces as we’ve embarked on a period of off-site programming. Bringing commissions, premieres, and rare performances to new contexts and spaces throughout NYC, including The Invisible Dog, ISSUE has doubled down on its commitment to artists whose work eludes convention. Join us in recognizing this important milestone in our history.
benedict nguyễn is a #freelanceflailing dancer, writer, and creative producer. A 2023 Periplus Fellow, she has written criticism for BOMB Magazine, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Review of Books, INTO, and AAWW’s The Margins, among other outlets. Recent projects include her curatorial platform "soft bodies in hard places," the newsletter “first quarter moon slush,” #bennyboosbookclub, and the zine “nasty notes,” which she published in 2022. Her debut novel Hot Girls with Balls is forthcoming from Catapult. @xbennyboo / benedict-nguyen.com
Anh Vo is a Vietnamese dancer and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. They create dances and texts about pornography and queer relations, about being and form, about identity and abstraction, about history and its colonial reality. They receive their degrees in Performance Studies from Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA). Vo is currently a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow.
