Good Day God Damn - Extracted Excerpt w/ Pies + Performance

Good Day God Damn - Extracted Excerpt

Traveling through the fractured American landscape, looming vibrations push the ground up and the cosmos down as our community-turned-cabal explores domestic terror as self-harm. Through the lens of a thriller our cell flows through domestic borders, mingles with the extraterrestrial and unpacks landlocked limitations through discursive research and rigorous ensemble development.  This live event will include two GDGD ensemble members in person, and many others in absentia.

Performers/Collaborators:  Performing Live Mimi Gabriel + Jessie Young (Developed along with Angie Pittman + Leslie Cuyjet)   Dur. 15 min

. . . . . . . . . . . More Info on Pies and Performance Below. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Pie & Performance*winter - Saturday, March 17 - Tickets at door: $10-$20 (sliding scale)

8pm Doors 8:30-10pm | 16 St. Francis Pl, Brooklyn, NY 11216

Pie & Performance gathers artist and audience interested in activating empathy and steeping in togetherness. The performances take place in various rooms, hallways, and corners of a three-story home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. And, there is always pie! Organized seasonally by Amity Jones, Kirsten Schnittker, and Tara Sheena.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .*program*. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Good Day God Damn - Extracted Excerpt   by Stephanie Acosta | stephanieacosta.org 

Performing Live Mimi Gabriel + Jessie Young  Developed along with Angie Pittman + Leslie Cuyjet

untitled (panorama study II) by Laura Bartczak | laurabartczak.squarespace.com

collaborators: Laurel Atwell, Katelyn Hales, Corinne Cappelletti, Kay Ottinger, Amity Jones

Void: Honest Rituals for Lost Souls (working title)  by Raha Behnam | rahabehnam.com

#myroomchronicles by Evelyn Lilian Sánchez Narvaez

King  by Kyle Marshall | kmchoreography.com

chance realization + history  by Sarah Snider | sarah-gwen.com

Sunday Service with Jess Pretty | 03.04.2018 (Queens, NY)

To kick off the spring season of Sunday Service, curator Jess Pretty invites artists to respond to the notion of critical desire and the exploration of radical thriving as a methodology for taking up spaces we claim to reside in. Featuring artists Trinity Dawn Bobo, Taylor Crichton, DJ JCLEF, Amanda Krische, and Evelyn Sanchez

Sunday, March 4th, 2018 | 7:00pm | RSVP on fb HERE

Jess Pretty states, “i’m interested in rigorously interrogating pleasure as a way of living past survival, seeking other worlds and times and spaces for art. other possibilities for our delicate bodies to be present in performance. questioning how are we constantly evaluating the stakes involved in our work-making process. the labor of being unapologetic. i desire work rooted in the fantastic that helps formulate how to queer our own possibilities and modes of migration.”

About Sunday Service
Taking place the first Sunday of each month, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of cross-disciplinary performances and presentations that brings together a multiplicity of views around a singular prompt, such as a question, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service centers works in progress, interdisciplinary endeavors, and diversity in format showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster the testing of ideas and critical discourse amongst peers.

Sunday Service is programmed by Stephanie Acosta and Alexis Wilkinson, Knockdown Center’s Director of Exhibitions and Live Art. 

Sunday Service Series is BACK - Season 3

This killer line up can't be beat!  We are so thrilled to be back with another season of mad creators brining vibes and modes of engagement together for our performance/discourse series. This work is only made possible by the efforts of my Co-Founder/Programmer Alexis Wilkinson and the gang over at Knockdown Center.  See you SUNDAY!!

Taking place the first Sunday of each month, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of cross-disciplinary performance and presentations that bring together a mulitiplicy of views around a singular prompt, such as a question, theme, or formal structure.  Sunday Service centers works in progress, interdixciplinary endeavors, and diversity in forma showcase in a lo-fi environment to foster the testing of ideas and critical discourse amongst peers. 

Spring Schedule 2018
March 4 | 7pm: Curator Jess Pretty
April 8 | 7pm: Rena Anakwe 
May 6 | 7pm: Curator Janani Balasubramanian
June 3 | Curator Mariana Valencia 

Deep Descent + Descend Sky w/ Jessie Young at NYLA

Deep Decent is a 20 min long video response to a long term collaborative process with choreographer Jessie Young on her ensemble dance piece titled Descend Sky. Following the long history of art as discourse I came home after a long studio visit with Young and created this expanded video work in response to the involved world of deep sea, the horror of reflection and the impossibility of true direction.

You can watch a snacky sample HERE or below! 

A 3 channel projection of Deep Descent showed along with Young's performance of Descend Sky as part of Fresh Tracks at New York Live Arts in December 2017.

Composer Jason Finkelman

Museum of Art and Design - Choreographer in Residence (NY)

Museum of Art and Design - Choreographer in Residence 

So excited to announce that I will be spending the Fall into Winter at the Museum of Art and Design as Choreographer in Residence!  I'll be developing the first installment of an interdisciplinary project  currently titled Good Day God Damn.  There will be showings in February 2018 at MAD, Joining me as inaugural Choreographers in Residence are NIC Kay and Steven Reker, invited by the brilliant Danny Orendorff we will tackle sound and play and create new works in the new year. Check overly serious pic of me below! 

The Ladies Almanack - OUTFEST World Premiere (LA)

We are beyond ourselves with excitement to announce The Ladies Almanack WORLD PREMIERE is an official selcection for Outfest LA as part of the Platinum section!!! 

More festivals to come but for now mark your calendars for Wednesday July 12th @ 9:45pm at the Directors Guild of America!  We'll be at Outfest all week so come say hello and see more of what this iconic festival has to offer. 

Online tickets on sale NOW! (PRESALE is SOLD OUT but there will be STAND BY!) 

It has been a long and complex road to create this feature film from scratch.  It is only through the support of our community and our commitment to this team and story that any of this is possible and we are so excited to be starting the road to you the audience.  

THANK YOU to all of the artists, makers, friends, family, lesbians, queers, poets, lovers, who helped us create this world.  We are forever in your debt! 

Forever your proud producer, 

Stephanie

---

The Ladies Almanack - Platinum - DGA 2
(USA, 2017, 87 min) - World Premiere
Directed By: Daniel Shy
Cast: Hélène Cixous, Guinevere Turner and Eileen Myles


Learn the secrets of 1928’s Parisian lesbian literary circle. Based on Djuna Barnes’s book following lesbian Casanova Natalie Barney, this Super 8 film explores the rich queer femme social scene of jazz-age Paris. Spanning time, the large cast, including Hélène Cixous, Eileen Myles, and Guinevere Turner, portrays the lives of artists and luminaries (Gertrude Stein, Collete, Dolly Wilde), exposing the lush lesbian landscape that gave rise to some of literature’s most treasured writing. World Premiere.

Preceded By: Overload/Babel
Dir: Linzi Juliano/Kayla Tange, 2 min.

Sunday Service with SAME AS SISTER | 07.02.2017 (Queens)

This month's Sunday Service is bringing longtime loves Same As Sister on as curators.  Titled Pairings in Horror: The Visceral + The Visual Impact, the evening will feature live and digital performances by Lamy Istrefi Jr. with Leo Genovese + Mersiha Mesihovic/CircuitDebris,Stacy Grossfield Dance Projects + Gil Sperling, plus a special reading by Rie Yamaguchi-Borden. Each pair will utilize live and digital elements to emphasize the sensory pleasure that best represents their collaboration between disciplines. Set in a haunted house, the artists’ unique interpretations of the shared text will become rooms into their uncanny and unpredictable imaginations, perhaps even nightmares.

About Sunday Service
Sunday Service is a curated series of short-form live performances across mediums. Taking place the first Sunday of each month in the Ready Room, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of in-progress works, performances, and presentations, anchored by a framing principle such as a question, proposition, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service encourages works in progress and interdisciplinary endeavors showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster experimentation and critical discourse amongst peers.

I AM A POTTED PALM - Miami Performance Festival 2017

A continued delving into the sensory worlds created for Potted Palm V.1, the artist returns to the studio to expand on the evolving relationship with an increasingly distant memory of home.

 I Am A Potted Palm V. 2 , Saturday, June 24th @ 8:40p

Edge Zone as part of Miami Performance International Festival. 

In the wake of this invitation to perform in my home town, which I have never done, brought into relief the extent to which my recent practice has worked to create a memory phantom of this place that made me. Using this place ness from which to reimagine what it means to feel estranged from that which held my families exiled past. A work created to both conjure and harmonize what it had meant to be so far so long, now returns to it’s place of birth and it’s fertile bone yard.

For more info on Miami Performance International Festival check out their site www.miamiperformancefestival.org

Sunday Service with Andrea Arrubla + BABZ Fair | 06.04.2017

So ready for upcoming Sunday Service hosted by Andrea Arrubla as part of BABZ FAIR 2017 and the line up is killer!!! The evening will reflect and celebrate the legacy of the seminal poet Essex Hemphill established among contemporary literary and visual artists with Tiona Nekkia McClodden, James Allister Sprang, Peter BD, and Karmenife X.


The 5th annualBABZ FAIR 2017 presented by Blonde Art Books is a weekend long event that features small press art and poetry publishers, and individual artist projects, alongside a program of performance, readings, and workshops. BABZ Fair will be taking place Friday, June 2 through Sunday, June 4, 2017.

Over the years the BABZ Fair has grown dramatically and this year the fair will feature art books and zines by over 100 publishers and artists from across the country. This year we are collaborating with artist Andrea Arrubla to produce the weekend programming. The full program schedule, including a new expanded program series, and workshop series, will be announced shortly.

Sunday Service is a curated series of short-form live performances across mediums. Taking place the first Sunday of each month in the Ready Room, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of in-progress works, performances, and presentations, anchored by a framing principle such as a question, proposition, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service encourages works in progress and interdisciplinary endeavors showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster experimentation and critical discourse amongst peers.

Sunday Service - A Raging Grace with Caitlin Baucom | 05.07.2017

NEXT WEEK we are BACK with the raging Sunday Service: Caitlin Baucom presents... An Only Child, Orlando Estrada, Greem Jellyfish, PAUL (Angelina Dreem),QUALIATIK, & Lorelei Ramirez. 
The evening, titled 'A Raging Grace,' will gather artists across disciplines who are lit from within by a burning well, and rather than combust use its fuels to go higher and brighter. 

‘It’s like having a sickness that gets more fierce as it passes on to wellness. We don’t have to view that period as an invitation to despair, but as a sign of potential transformation… whatever pain we are experiencing…’ –bell hooks

Working across performative disciplines, they are each also active as organizers and participants in their broader communities, acknowledging that the roots of rage go beyond the merely personal and its power can feed the world. Together ‘we admit that we don’t want to see the world blown up; we are for the human species.’ 
–Andrea Juno & V. Vale, Angry Women.

Sunday Service is a curated series of short-form live performances across mediums. Taking place the first Sunday of each month in the Ready Room, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of in-progress works, performances, and presentations, anchored by a framing principle such as a question, proposition, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service encourages works in progress and interdisciplinary endeavors showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster experimentation and critical discourse amongst peers.
 

Sunday Service "Slumber Party" with Buzz Slutzky | 04.02.2017 (Queens)

Our rad ass series Sunday Service is back this week at the Knockdown Center with Buzz Slutzky presiding!  Brining in the awesome Jes Fan, Trace Peterson, and Catalina Schliebener to hash it out on the mic and screen taking on "Slumber Party" vibes relating to trans aesthetics and childhood.  We will be snacking on popcorn, magical color candy eggs, and covering our nails in glitter while we hash out the fun, mad, sweet, stuff. Sunday Service keeps rolling, finding ways to take on HOW we discourse, making frames, taking up space.  So proud of this series and can't wait to keep bringing more to Knockdown Center and YOU! See you there!    RSVP on fb HERE

UPDATE - Watch the full video HERE shot by James Tate from Intrinsic Grey

About Sunday Service
Sunday Service is a curated series of short-form live performances across mediums. Taking place the first Sunday of each month in the Ready Room, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of in-progress works, performances, and presentations, anchored by a framing principle such as a question, proposition, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service encourages works in progress and interdisciplinary endeavors showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster experimentation and critical discourse amongst peers.

Rethinking Feminism Panel at SOHO20 | 03.25.2017 (Brooklyn)

Thrilled to be joining Cat Tyc and an incredible line up of artists and thinkers at SOHO20 this week in an open format discussion tackling the ever changing role of feminism and the "right now" . I'm nervously excited to get into the thick of it, and getting to some nuance in a conversation that needs to get past branding and into purpose, ethics, and who defines. See you there! 

Participants include:  Ruby Brunton, Stephanie Acosta, Christen Clifford, Marianna Ellenberg, Victoria Keddie, Jasmine Gibson, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, Sheetal Prajapati, Buzz Slutzky, Bishakh Som, Stephanie Strickland, and Wendy Vogel

SOHO20 presents NOW//NOW//NOW//NOW as part of the ongoing series Rethinking Feminism, moderated by writer and artist Cat Tyc. This event is centered around instigating conversation around the question of ‘What do we do now?’ in regards to the issues that the Women’s March has brought to the foreground of consciousness in regards to race, sexuality, gender binary identification, and class. Tyc invites fellow artists/writers/curators to speak about how they are are dealing with these issues in their creative work to help guide a conversation in the room about how to move forward.

Sunday Service is BACK with Niall Jones | 03.05.2017 (Queens)

WE ARE BACK with curator as conductor Niall Jones throwing down a rad line up and testing out new structural scores as a mode of presenting. This night is going to be full of movement, madness, poetic plans, and a dash of the occult. 

This month, Knockdown Center invites Niall Jones to curate Sunday Service. Niall has invited Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Effie Bowen, Angie Pittman, Raha, and Travis Sisk / Manifestany Squirtz to share work across mediums. The evening will explore the dance party and nightlife, historically and empirically, as a commingling of multiple bodies and multiple ethics. The dance party ostensibly functions as a movement, at once, for and against the sturdiness of identity, and all the while irreducibly in pursuit of (un)certain pleasures and intractable notions of self.

Night, the persistence of virtuosic utterances, when language slips into dance, into moan.

when language slips into dance, 
the persistence of virtuosic utterance,
into moan
Night

UPDATE - Watch the full video HERE shot by James Tate from Intrinsic Grey

Sunday Service is a curated series of short-form live performances across mediums. Taking place the first Sunday of each month in the Ready Room, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of in-progress works, performances, and presentations, anchored by a framing principle such as a question, proposition, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service encourages works in progress and interdisciplinary endeavors showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster experimentation and critical discourse amongst peers.

NEW SERIES - Sunday Service with MAMI | 02.12.2016 (Queens)

I am psyched to be opening the year right with a new series created with Alexis Wilkinson at the Knockdown Center titled SUNDAY SERVICE! I've been thinking about the ways we can communicate about subjects, how discourse might look as performance, how sharing helps create dynamic conversations, how making is speaking.  

For the premier of Sunday Service, Knockdown Center invites MAMIcurators Ali Rosa-Salas and Dyani Douze who in turn have invited Alexandra Bell, NIC Kay, Isabel Flower, Marcel Rosa-Salas, and YATTA to share projects in development across movement, writing, visual art, and sonic practices. With an insistence on collective care, we’ll process what we’ve witnessed together in a dialogue over drinks.

UPDATE - Watch the full video HERE 

Sunday Service is a curated series of short-form live performances across mediums. Taking place the first Sunday of each month in the Ready Room, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of in-progress works, performances, and presentations, anchored by a framing principle such as a question, proposition, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service encourages works in progress and interdisciplinary endeavors showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster experimentation and critical discourse amongst peers.

 

Power Share/Power Surge: A Panel Discussion (NY) 01.14.17

Thrilled to be moderating this panel at one of my creative homes, the Knockdown Center! Come thru NY!

Power Share/Power Surge: A Panel Discussion on Activism, Aging, Art,  Black Lives Matter, Civil Rights, Intersectional Feminisms, Sexuality, Trans Rights, and more. What can we do? Where do we connect? How can we share power?

Saturday, January 14, 2pm.

Curated and donated by Christen Clifford 

Moderated by Stephanie Acosta

Panelists: Ashton Applewhite, Ayana Evans, Buzz Slutsky and Pamela Sneed

Power Share/Power Surge, curated by artist and activist Christen Clifford, came about through her consideration of feminism and asking whether there was a difference between identity politics and civil rights, and how we can come together to share our power. Clifford invited four amazing artists and writers to connect, with the definition of  “connect” in mind as “a link to a power supply.”

Christen Clifford is an activist, curator, feminist performance artist, mother and writer whose work includes the PussyBow . She teaches at The New School.

This event is part of a fundraising series of music, performances, and workshops accompanying NASTY WOMEN exhibition, on view at Knockdown Center January 12-15th, 2017. 

STAY NASTY - Fundraiser ft. 4 Days of Music, Art + Performance
Day time performances are free and open to the public, while evening programming can be experienced through the purchase of a $20 all-access pass that grants you access to every performance happening in the building that evening. Proceeds in benefit of select charities working towards women’s reproductive health and community health initiatives.