ISSUE's events curated by past & present Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellows are FREE to stream. In lieu of purchasing tickets, please consider making a $25 suggested donation (or an amount that you feel is meaningful) in support of ISSUE's 2020 commissions and Artist Fund.
Friday, November 20th, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd presents The Last Moon in Mellowland, curated by 2019 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow Benedict Nguyen. This work is a choreographic collaging of movement, sound, and visuals that compile months of footage and rehearsals over late summer and early fall 2020. The work features choreography and performance by Lloyd alongside dancers Breeanah Breeden and Ariana Speight. Tiffany Lloyd will conduct much of the videography under the direction of Lloyd. This is Nguyen’s fifth project of their curatorial platform, soft bodies in hard places, a series of trans-disciplinary events circling planetary events that began at ISSUE in 2019.
November 20th anticipates a first quarter moon in Aquarius (on November 21st) and nears the end of the Sun’s passage through Scorpio. The first quarter moon is a moment of accumulation and becoming marked with crisp clarity. Frequent soft bodies collaborator Stephanie George will provide astrological dramaturgy and language to support the creative process.
For Lloyd, this work is an offering of several moving visuals that invite viewers into their imagination as they oscillate between the perception of the nonsensical and the reality of a moment. The Last Moon in Mellowland is not a work that you simply watch; it is an entangled landscape that becomes an architecture of its own, a world that you must venture through and engage with in order to experience.
Having primarily made work for live performance since moving to Brooklyn in 2016, Lloyd is eager to discover new possibilities with this shift in medium. Several unraveling narratives and inner stories thread together by precise, time-based editing and a compact sonic landscape that feels like both a memory and a dream of its own.
Lloyd believes that viewers already remember a place called Mellowland, a place that lives on the edge of quietude and the ordinary. It gives viewers permission to honor their intuitive listening and yearns to deepen the ways in which we experience the minutes, hours, and days that we are moving through.
soft bodies in hard places acknowledges its presence on the unceded land of Lenape and Canarsee People.
Jordan Demetrius Lloyd (Choreographer, Performer, Sound, and Visual Director/Designer) is a dance artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Lloyd is a graduate of The College at Brockport and is originally from Albany, NY. He has collaborated with and performed for Karl Rogers, Netta Yerushalmy, Tammy Carrasco, Monica Bill Barnes, Catherine Galasso, Laura Peterson, Ambika Raina, and David Dorfman Dance. His work has been produced by New York Live Arts, BRIC, Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church, The Center for Performance Research, and Brooklyn Studios for Dance. For more head to jordandlloyd.com
Breeanah Breeden (Performer) is a Black freelance performing and media artist, dance teacher, and curator. Her choreographic and performance work has been presented at Post/Future Performance Festival in 2020, Gibney Work Up program in 2019, Embodied Spaces Festival I and II in 2018, and at Earl Mosley Institute of the Arts dance talk series in 2016. She is a dancer and the Managing Director for Proteo Media + Performance, and performs with VON HOWARD PROJECT, MICHIYAYA Dance, Pioneers Go East Collective!, and Jordan Demetrius Lloyd along with other freelance projects. She is from Cheraw, S.C. and received a BFA in Dance from Montclair State University.
Ariana Speight (Performer) is a recent graduate of Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University with a BFA in Dance and a minor in Africana Studies. Her dance training has included: Ballet, Contemporary, Contact Improvisation, Modern, and Jazz. Originally from Los Angeles, she had the opportunity to dance abroad at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance where she studied Gaga technique with former Batsheva company members and learned repertory from Vertigo Dance Company; in addition to working with artists like Kyle Abraham, David Dorfman, and Yin Yue during the course of her training and professional career. She is also certified as a Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT) under Om Factory School of Yoga/Yoga Alliance.
Tiffany Lloyd (Videographer) is a graduate of The College at Saint Rose where she studied Public Relations and Advertising. She has a passion for live music production and is currently working at Paradigm Talent Agency in their music department. She is a freelance DJ and has done videography work for Round Table Records and Nomaadic, a music hub for artist discovery and playlist curation that she created in 2016. She has interviewed artists such as Grace Weber, Asoh Black!, Boregard, and Halem’s own DonSMITH to support emerging and up and coming music artists.
Stephanie George (Dramaturg) is a storyteller, curator, and grassroots fundraiser from the Bronx, NY. Across media, she creates spaces that grapple with notions of home, belonging, and remembering. Stephanie was a 2014 curatorial fellow at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, and her public art exhibitions have been featured in The Huffington Post, Salon, and Ebony Magazine. She was the assistant director of the 2018 off-Broadway production of Jeremy Kamps' Breitwisch Farm. A dramaturg and performance doula to movement and performance artists, Stephanie has collaborated on Benedict Nguyen's 2019 soft bodies in hard places residency at ISSUE Project Room and J. Bouey's Chiron in Leo. Stephanie has studied poetry with the New York Writers Coalition, Cave Canem, The Speakeasy Project and through AWP’s Spring 2019 Writer to Writer Mentorship program. Her work has been published in Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s literary magazine, The Margins. She holds a B.A. in Africana Studies from Vassar College, where she first developed an ongoing curiosity about how Black women artist-activist transform cityscapes and is currently building a chapbook of poems.
Benedict Nguyen (Curator) is a dancer and writer currently living on unceded Lenape and Wappinger lands (South Bronx, NY). As curator of “soft bodies in hard places,” they’ve presented programs in partnership with the Asian American Writers Workshop, Center for Performance Research, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance!, Materials for the Arts, and Culturebot. They publish an e-newsletter “first quarter moon slush” and are sometimes online @xbennyboo.
