New York Live Arts Presents Makini’s "TERRESTRIAL: The Sprout" (World Premiere)
Company:
Makini
NEW YORK LIVE ARTS PRESENTS WORLD PREMIERE OF MAKINI’s TERRESTRIAL: The Sprout
2025 USA FELLOW AND 2023 GUGGENHEIM FELLOW
“brilliant, spinetingling collage” - Eva Yaa Asantewaa
March 13-15 7:30 PM
New York, NY (February 13th, 2025) – New York Live Arts’ (Live Arts) Live Feed creative residency and commissioning program presents the World Premiere of Makini’s (jumatatu m. poe) TERRESTRIAL: The Sprout.
TERRESTRIAL: The Sprout is the first performance work in the collaborative series of works titled TERRESTRIAL. The series is a multidisciplinary project that weaves together performance, choreography, speculative futurist thought and equity-based models of cooperation to re-calibrate social, cultural and physical existence. TERRESTRIAL: The Sprout will be presented in the New York Live Arts Theater (219 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011) Thursday, March 13th at 7:30pm through Saturday, March 15th at 7:30pm. A Stay Late Conversation will follow the performance on Friday, March 14th. Tickets start at $30 with limited Pay-What-You-Wish options, and can be purchased at NewYorkLiveArts.org or 212-924-0077, on sale now. Please see additional ticketing options below.
Conceived by Makini (Durham, North Carolina, USA), with co-direction by Anderson Feliciano (Belo Horizonte, Brazil) and Nefertiti Charlene Altan (San Francisco, California, USA), The Sprout is a solo dance performed by Germaine Ingram that wonders about the legacy of a single human lifetime as it relates to the broader expanse of a planet’s geological history. Jazz-informed artist and scholar Melanie George participates in the creative team as Movement Doula. The work weaves sensuous, rhythmic choreographies into spatial and intellectual puzzles as choreographies move in currents through the performance space. Audiences join the performer on stage, occasionally invited to move within and through the space. Additional collaborators include Angel Edwards, Germaine Ingram, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Lou Pires, Majesty Royale-Jackson, Marco Farroni, Saúl Ulerio and Sweet Corey-Bey.
Wandering through the terrain of identity amidst the impossibility of individuation, this multi-lingual, transgeographic space is a collaborative of Black, Indigenous and Mestiza artists from lands currently called “Brazil” and the “US.” Together, they are developing a body of performance-based time capsules that interweave imagined / half-truth / rumored / hyperbolized image fragments of Blackness and Indigeneity throughout the past several decades, patching together the plurality of these phenomena through invented court/ceremony dances situated in the very distant future.
Live Arts’ 2024-2025 season presents works that offer a unique perspective on freedom, identity, resilience, spirituality and our place in the world, resonating deeply with our belief that the communal begins with the personal. Onsite performance tickets start at a standard price of $30. Live Arts is proud to launch new community ticket pricing, allowing the public to choose a price that fits any budget. Limited “Pay-What-You-Wish” tickets are available for all onsite events. To support this, Live Arts has introduced a "What-It-Really-Costs" ticket at $250, reflecting the true cost of a performance in NYC. Students and Seniors receive 20% off standard prices and $10 Student Rush tickets are available for any onsite show that is not sold-out.
TERRESTRIAL: The Sprout is a Creative Capital project and has been supported through a Guggenheim Fellowship. The project is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Dance Place, New York Live Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Radical Healing, and NPN. For more information www.npnweb.org. The project has also been developed in partnerships with Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts’ Caroline Hearst Choreographer-In-Residence Program and the Black Performance Institute of University of Pennsylvania. Additionally, the project received support from the Durham Arts Council. This project was supported by the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and Durham Arts Council, local grants administrator.
ABOUT MAKINI
I am a choreographer, performer, and video artist, based between traditional lands of the Tutelo-Saponi speaking peoples and lands of the Lenape peoples, who grew up dancing around the living room and at parties with my siblings and cousins. My early exposure to concert dance was through African dance and capoeira performances on California college campuses where my Pan- Africanist parents studied and worked, but I did not start “formal” dance training until college with Umfundalai, Kariamu Welsh’s contemporary African dance technique. My work continues to be influenced by various sources, including my foundations in those living rooms and parties, my early technical training in contemporary African dance, my continued study of contemporary dance and performance, my movement trainings with dancer and anatomist Irene Dowd around anatomy and proprioception, my sociological research of and technical training in J-sette performance with Jermone Donte Beacham. Through my artistic work, I strive to engage in and further dialogues with Black queer folks, create lovingly agitating performance work that recognizes History as only one option for the contextualization of the present, and continue to encourage artists to understand themselves as part of a larger community of workers who are imagining pathways toward economic ecosystems that prioritize care, interdependence, and delight.
I work collaboratively in a variety of constellations. In 2008, I co-founded idiosynCrazy productions and co-directed it with Shannon Murphy. The company produced performance work and served as a resource for public conversations around the integrations of art into society, and the social responsibility of the artist. Since 2011, I have worked collaboratively with J-Sette artist Jermone Donte Beacham on a series of visual and performance works called Let ‘im Move You. Previously, I have performed with Marianela Boán, Silvana Cardell, devynn emory, Emmanuelle Hunyh, Tania Isaac, Kun-Yang Lin, C. Kemal Nance, Ligia Lewis, Marissa Perel, Leah Stein, Keith Thompson, Kate Watson-Wallace, Merián Soto, Reggie Wilson, Jesse Zaritt, and Kariamu Welsh (as a member of Kariamu & Company). From 2009-2018, I was an Assistant Professor of Dance at Swarthmore College.
I have performed my work in various cities nationally and internationally, and I have received various awards including: a 2010-2011 Live Arts Brewery Fellowship (Philadelphia), a 2012 Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Fellowship (Philadelphia), a 2013 NRW Tanzrecherche Fellowship (Germany), a 2013 New York Live Arts Studio Series (then, Dance Theater Workshop) residency with Jesse Zaritt (NYC), a 2016 Independence Fellowship (Philadelphia), a 2017 Sacatar Residency Fellowship (Bahia, Brazil), a 2017 MAP Fund award with Jermone Donte Beacham, a 2017 NEFA National Dance Project Production Grant with Jermone Donte Beacham, a 2018 MANCC residency, a 2019 EMPAC residency, a 2020 Creative Capital Award, a 2020 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant-to-Artists award, a 2023 Herb Alpert Award, a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, and three Swarthmore College Cooper Foundation grants for presenting other artists (Swarthmore, PA).
Incidentally, my birth middle name is Mtafuta-Ukweli, which means “one who searches for the truth” in Kiswahili.
NEW YORK LIVE ARTS
New York Live Arts, guided by the leadership of visionary artist Bill T. Jones, collaborates with boundary pushing artists, advocates for their vision, and fortifies a creative future. It also serves as home base for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, which has been creating groundbreaking work for over forty years. New York Live Arts acknowledges and offers deep gratitude to Lenapehoking, where the theater sits-the land, and waters of the Lenape homeland.
Support for New York Live Arts is provided by the Arnhold Foundation, Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Ed Bradley Family Foundation, Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, Dance/NYC, Ford Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, Harkness Foundation for Dance, Marta Heflin Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Alex Katz Foundation, Lambent Foundation, Alice Lawrence Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Muriel Pollia Foundation, National Performance Network, New England Foundation for the Arts, The Poss Family Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Jerome Robbins Foundation, The Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, San Francisco Foundation, The Semel Charitable Foundation, Scherman Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, Tides Foundation, Villa Albertine and Albertine Foundation. Corporate support for New York Live Arts includes Google and Tito’s Handmade Vodka.
Public support for New York Live Arts is from National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council with special thanks to Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Dance/NYC’s New York City Dance Rehearsal Space Subsidy Program, made possible by Mellon Foundation.
We thank our Partners for New Performance for supporting Live Feed, Fresh Tracks, Live Ideas, Bill Chats, and humanities programming: Alexes Hazen, Linda Hirschson, Julie Orlando, John Robinson, Andrea Rosen, Nina Stricker, Robyn Trani.
Photo Credit: Germaine Ingram by Angel Edwards, Courtesy of The Artist
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