The coming digital season at Baryshnikov Arts Center will feature the premieres of seven video works that the organization commissioned in September from artists including Kyle Marshall, Bijayini Satpathy and Justin Hicks. The debuts begin on Feb. 1 with the release of Satpathy’s “Vibhanga,” a piece that draws on classical Indian dance forms, and conclude in late June with Marshall’s “STELLAR,” a choreographed outgrowth of improvisation sessions that he will conduct on Zoom this spring. Each video will be available to stream on-demand for free at bacnyc.org for two weeks.
“It’s a huge experiment for us, but why not?” Mikhail Baryshnikov, the center’s founder and artistic director, said in email. “When has there ever been a better time to get creative and reimagine what we do?”
Baryshnikov said he was intrigued by the dynamics of sharing art over the internet. “Work presented on a digital platform is kind of a massive blind date,” he said. “With such global reach, the possibilities that someone will make a real connection to what they’re seeing are limitless.”
Dance-based work makes up the majority of the slate: Mariana Valencia’s solo “brownout” will be available March 1-15 and Stefanie Batten Bland’s collaboration with the installation artist Conrad Quesen, “Kolonial,” will follow in May.
But several more interdisciplinary projects will also be on offer. Hicks’s “Use Your Head for More” combines found sound and spoken text to create a series of portraits (Feb. 15 to March 1); Holland Andrews’s “Museum of Calm” includes vocal music, meditation and performance art (March 15-29); and Tei Blow’s digital installation, “The Sprezzaturameron” uses video game technology to tell the story of artists in an apocalyptic near-future (May 17-31).
Baryshnikov Arts will also continue to share performances from its archive throughout the spring. Scheduled highlights include the New York premiere of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s dance duet “Verklärte Nacht” from 2019 (April 8-15) and a 2018 concert performance by the Tesla Quartet and the soprano Alexandra Smither (April 15-22).
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