BUILDING A BETTER FISHTRAP/PHASE 2 by Paloma McGregor

Company:
Paloma McGregor
BAX | Brooklyn Arts Exchange is proud to present an
Artist in Residence event
BUILDING A BETTER FISHTRAP/PHASE 2
Choreographed and Performed by Paloma McGregor
In collaboration with visual artist Sara Jimenez, installation designer Vassi Spanos and sound designer Everett Saunders
Friday-Saturday, June 17-18, 2016 @ 8:00pm
Tickets: $16 General, $10 Low-Income [Buy] Limited seating
Building a Better Fishtrap/Phase 2 is a solo meditation on the practice of remembering: What do we take with us? Leave behind? Return to reclaim? Choreographer and performer Paloma McGregor navigates and transforms a world crafted in collaboration with visual artist Sara Jimenez, installation designer Vassi Spanos and sound designer Everett Saunders. Through this process she encourages us to consider how memory inhabits us and what we can reclaim in the witnessing.
Developed during McGregor's two year artist residency at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Fishtrap/Phase 2 is the second full-length iteration of Building a Better Fishtrap, a project rooted in McGregor's ongoing exploration of her 90-year-old father's vanishing fishing tradition. Building a Better Fishtrap/Part 1 premiered at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance in 2015; in it, an ensemble wove a kaleidoscopic tale of relationships created and destroyed, and a young girl's journey back to herself. "The work feels like a danced bedtime tale with dreamy happenings and archetypal, beloved characters who shapeshift form with ease," wrote Eva Yaa Asantewaa on InfiniteBody, "it works best by leaving ample room for your own imaginings and feelings. Building A Better Fishtrap prepares and invites its audience, casting a spell that inspires trust [and] we fell into McGregor's welcome with gratitude."
McGregor and her collaborators - from a Grandfather in the Bronx to dancers in a studio on Governor's Island - have spent the past five years exploring the body's capacity to carry place, memory and experience with it in ways that can transform objects, spaces, collaborators and audiences. McGregor has also won support from the Jerome Foundation's Travel & Study Grant to apprentice herself with fishermen in her native St. Croix; Dance Exchange's Green Choreographers Residency to develop the her Fishtrap Method; iLAND's residency to develop a collaboration with the Bronx River Alliance's education director; and LMCC's month-long Process Space residency to develop the theatrical work in a studio on Governor's Island.
The resulting artistic work has been presented in such diverse settings as an abandoned nursing home, a floating platform in the Bronx River and St. Mark's Church. Through this process, McGregor is forging a leadership role as one of a growing number of choreographers across the country whose work operates at the intersection of arts, community and activism. With each iteration, the hope is to deepen the connections collaborators and audiences have with one another's legacies and the future of our embattled water spaces.
A forthcoming iteration, tentatively titled From the River's Mouth, will be a performance installation along the Bronx River, slated for 2018.
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