½ A CANARY TORSI
Company:
YANIRA CASTRO
“Forget the safety of distance; this is the palpable sensation of art – up-close and personal.” --Encore Magazine
Performances will take place at The Invisible Dog Art Center, October 27 - 31, November 3 - 7 (Wednesday – Sunday) at 7:30pm. There will also be a Coffee and Conversation pre-show talk with Ursula Eagly and Ivan Sagoda on Oct 27th (Wednesday) at 6:30pm, a Post-show Talk with Hélène Lesterlin on Oct 29th (Friday), and a Post-show Talk with Brian McCormick on Nov 5th (Friday).Tickets are 0—LIMITED SEATING—and are available online at dancetheaterworkshop.org, over the phone at 212.924.0077, and in person at the box office. Dance Theater Workshop Members, Students and Seniors are eligible for a 25% discount (5 Tickets). Box office hours are Monday – Friday from 5pm-9pm and Saturday – Sunday from 12pm – 8pm. The Invisible Dog Art Center is located at 51 Bergen Street, Brooklyn - Btw Smith & Court St. Subway F or G to Bergen Street.
In addition the Wilderness installation will be open to the public at The Invisible Dog Art Center October 28 – 31, and November 4 – 7 from 1pm until 5pm.
About the Artists
Puerto Rican born and Brooklyn-based director/choreographer Yanira Castro collaborates with a core group of performers and designers on individual projects. She creates hybrid performance works that integrate movement, installation, music, text and visual elements such as film and video. She is the director/instigator of a canary torsi, an organism engaged in the creation of multi-disciplinary art collaborations.
Castro has earned a reputation for creatively rethinking audience’s perceptual and sensorial experience of a performance work. Her last project, Dark Horse/Black Forest (2009), presented by Performance Space 122 and Neke Carson at the Gershwin Hotel, enclosed the audience in a public bathroom with two performers in an intense emotional exchange. Center of Sleep (2008) placed audience and performers together in an aural and physical installation of 16 hemisphere speakers and mobile mirrors and platforms that transformed Dance Theater Workshop’s stage into a hive of transformational activity. fetus(twin) (2006), presented by The Chocolate Factory, consisted of two installations that highlighted the Factory’s unique ground floor and basement performance spaces: each audience member had their own individual headphone to overhear the proceedings of a harrowing surgical procedure as they witnessed a solo an arms-length away.
Castro’s work has been presented nationally at EMPAC, Roschel Performing Arts Center, Vanderbilt University, and Zoellner Performing Arts Center, among others. Internationally, Dark Horse has been presented in the public bathrooms of the George Bacovia Theater in Bacau, Romania; Daile Theatre in Riga, Latvia and the Tanzhaus in Düsseldorf, Germany for the International Tanzmesse.
Castro received her B.A. in Theater & Dance and Literature from Amherst College, and has been recognized with various awards from The Jerome Foundation, The Multi-Arts Production Fund, New York Foundation for the Art’s BUILD, Meet the Composer’s Commissioning Music/USA program, New York State Council on the Arts, American Music Center Live Music for Dance, Trust for Mutual Understanding, and USArtists International, among others. She has received various fellowships and residencies including LMCC’s Swing Space program, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Fellowship program, Sugar Salon (a program of Williamsburg Art neXus (WAX) in partnership with the Dance Department of Barnard College), ArtistNe(s)t and the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography.
Funding
Wilderness is commissioned by Dance Theater Workshop’s Commissioning and Creative Residency Program with support from the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and donors to The Fund for Continuing Innovation. Wilderness is funded in part by the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and additional funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Community Connections Fund of the MetLife Foundation.
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