Brooklyn-based skybetter and associates presents deepening investigations into affect, mathematics, and memory. Tracing the development of artistic director Sydney Skybetter’s formalism, the company will perform Near Abroad (2008), The Laws of Falling Bodies (2009), Temporary Matters (2011), Little Boy (2012) and the World Premiere of For Want of Sleep, featuring a commissioned score by composer Sxip Shirey.
Near Abroad refers to the antithetic impulse to contain yet remain separate from another, exploring the physicality of partnership and loss. With its assiduous sparseness, the piece suggests that the most intimate bonds are formed not out of what is shared, but what is mutually had and then lost. The Laws of Falling Bodies reflects on photographs of jumpers captured during the chaos of 9/11. Simultaneously beautiful and disturbing, these images compel a work conceived to render gorgeous movement and abject horror simultaneously, with sequences of arrested falling punctuated by moments of impact. Temporary Matters is a meditation on parenthood and the passage of youth, employing iterative mathematics in an effort to contend with underlying themes of loss of innocence and life. The resulting work is at once haphazard and serendipitous, using the temporal nature of dance to address the chaotic nature of birth. A dense, sweeping work, Little Boy references literary source material (ranging from Borges to Murakami) and the nascent movement of vocabulary of Skybetter’s infant son to explore themes of lineage and recurrence. For Want of Sleep (World Premiere) takes its title from a poem by Philip Larkin, and uses variations on the formal structure of mirroring to examine the rhythms of insomnia and partnership.
SKYBETTER AND ASSOCIATES
Joyce SoHo 155 Mercer (between Houston and Prince), NYC
B/D/F/M to Broadway – Lafayette Street; 6 to Bleecker Street; R to Prince Street
April 5-22, 2012
Tickets are $18 ($12 for students/seniors)
JoyceCharge: 212-242-0800, joyce.org
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