IN THE LAB
While in residence at NACL, the LEIMAY Ensemble will be working on video installation elements for a new interdisciplinary dance performance called A Meal. Part ritual, part celebration, part laboratory, and part dinner, A Meal centers on food justice and environmental ethics. The show is structured as a series of vignettes that audiences will wander through to participate in the act of eating together, witnessing embodied performance by mythological creatures, and experiencing sound/video movement installations.
On June 21st we will have an informal screening of the video installation created during their residency followed by a communal cooking experience where participants will have a hands-on opportunity to learn to make (and then eat) traditional Colombian arepas.
A Meal is among seven projects that advance racial and cultural justice selected for funding by the National Performance Network's Spring 2024 Development Fund. Funding is made possible with support from the Doris Duke Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency).
The full production will premiere in 2024 with a 3-week run at HERE (NYC). The team includes: Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya as directors/choreographers/designers; the LEIMAY Ensemble (Masanori Asahara, Ricardo Bustamante, Krystel Cooper, Mar Galeano, Andrea Jones, Brandon Perdomo, and Irena Romendik); as well as guest performers and composers.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
XIMENA GARNICA & SHIGE MORIYA | LEIMAY
Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya are a Colombian and Japanese multidisciplinary artist duo. Their collaborative works manifest as live installations, dance and theater performances, operas, and sculptures that are presented in theaters, museums, galleries, and public spaces. Alongside their performative work, Ximena and Shige also invest their energy in critical research, printed and digital publications, and community projects. Shige and Ximena are the co-founders and artistic directors of LEIMAY and the LEIMAY Ensemble. The word LEIMAY is a Japanese term symbolizing the changing moment between darkness and the light of dawn, or the transition from one era to the other. Ximena and Shige work out of their home studio CAVE, which is located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Garnica and Moriya are Creative Capital, National Dance Project, National Endowment for the Arts and Café Royal Cultural Foundation Award recipients, and Watermill Center and Chelsea Factory Artists in Residence. Garnica received the Van Lier Fellowship for extraordinary stage directors and was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California, Riverside. She is currently on the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Marymount Manhattan College and Sarah Lawrence College. Garnica and Moriya have been nominated for The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts and a United States Artists Fellowship. Her article ‘LEIMAY, CAVE, and the New York Butoh Festival’ was recently published in The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance.
Ximena and Shige’s work is rooted in questions of being, perception, interdependency and coexistence. They look to expose the multiplicity of spatial and temporal intervals that exist within the body, between materials and environments. They are curious about what emerges when the stability of habits, affirmation of binaries, social norm expectations, and the crystallization of identity dissolve and expose the potentialities of being.
HERE PARTNERSHIP
Residencies at NACL for HERE artists are the product of a long and fruitful relationship between the two organizations.
Since 1993, HERE has been one of New York’s most prolific arts organizations. Today, it stands at the forefront of the city’s cultural scene, producing and presenting daring, new, multidisciplinary performance experiences. Since its inception, HERE has been home to such acclaimed artists and works as Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge, Trey Lyford & Geoff Sobelle’s all wear bowlers, Young Jean Lee’s Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, James Scruggs’ Disposable Men, Corey Dargel’s Removable Parts, Robin Frohardt’s The Pigeoning, Basil Twist’s Symphonie Fantastique, and Looking at You by Rob Handel, Kristin Marting and Kamala Sankaram. We have produced and presented over 1,200 original works; served over 15,000 artists; and welcomed over 1,000,000 audience members. From our home in Lower Manhattan, HERE builds an inclusive community that nurtures artists of all backgrounds as they disrupt conventional expectations to create innovative performances in theatre, dance, music, puppetry, media, and visual art. By providing these genre-blending artists with an adaptive, flexible home for developing and producing their work, we share a range of perspectives reflective of the complexity of our city. HERE welcomes curious audiences to witness groundbreaking performances, responsive to the world in which we live, at free and affordable prices.
Photo by Hunter Canning