My choreography
Artist-in-Residence at Center for Performance Research 2022-23
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June 18, 2022: Co-organized with Jesi Cook a performance marathon to benefit Red Canary Song, an organizing collective for Asian & migrant sex workers
Hosted by Tess Dworman. Featuring luciana achugar, Stephanie Acosta, Chia-Lun Chang, Leslie Cuyjet, Francesca D’Uva, Aruni Dharmakirthi, DJ Jen Goma, Sam Kim, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Mina Nishimura, Lai Yi Ohlsen, Anh Vo, Lu Yim. Author Alexander Chee is generously matching the first $444 in tickets with a donation to Red Canary Song
Performance Philosophy Reading Group with Ayano Elson [virtual]
December 6, 2022: 2022 Artist-in-Residence Ayano Elson looks at the writing experiments of the late Bernadette Mayer to discuss ways of translating text into improvisational performance scores.
Sunday Salon – Ayano Elson: Poor Image (in progress)
Mertz Gilmore Late Stage Grant showing
March 12 2023
A Gardener at Roulette
Tuesday, June 29 + Wednesday, June 30, 2021
A Gardener is a new performance created by Ayano Elson in collaboration with lighting designer LD DeArmon, composer Matt Evans, video designer Hyung Seok Jeon, and writer and dancer Lydia Okrent. From a position at the center of the world’s oppressive imperial power, the piece explores a new future we can reach through democratic and egalitarian collaboration, through active participation and consensus-building. Elson and her co-creators examine the specifics and potentialities—colors, sounds, and scripts of text—that exist when the hierarchy between maker and performer disappears, revealing pieces of textures, patterns, and rhythms that are deeply human and connected. They work to construct a new language from these fragments, generating a whole that celebrates desire, pleasure, and conflict.
“During the course of this performance’s creation, Lydia Okrent (writer, dancer, and dramaturge) wrote a text. This writing grows out of conversational narcissism, Anne Boyer, landscape design, Alain Badiou, Wikipedia, and the choreography involved in developing a point of view through distance and difference. Matt Evans (composer and percussionist) put together a playlist with music that inspires tomorrow’s show. Lydia, Matt, Hyung Seok, and LD are the most imaginative people I’ve met and these objects are part of their creative practice in making A Gardener.” – Ayano Elson
Afterimages: An Ensemble Conversation in Thoughts by Lydia Okrent
A Gardener playlist by Matt Evans
roulette.org/event/ayano-elson-a-gardener
Artist-in-residence at LMCC through August 20, 2021
Photo: Courtney Cooke
With Womens Work: Ayano Elson at Issue Project Room
Issue Project Room
February 10, 2021
In the first days of the new year, my friend and collaborator Matt Evans, my partner John Dodig, and my dog Patrick woke up before sunrise to help me film and record this video outdoors in Prospect Park. Two women ate breakfast as they watched me perform multiple runs of this work — my first public performance in 10 months.
Pauline’s score directs us to “keep the next sound you hear in mind for the next half hour.” The implicit and potential physicality — listening, remembering, and holding — drew me into her words. In building my own interpretation of her text, I thought of the specific sounds and environments I wanted to keep in my body and the ones that are out of my reach.
Whenever I think of Pauline, I envision her holding a conch shell to her ear, as I have seen her do in photographs. As she listens to her own heartbeat, her body and the shell create a dark pyramid made of flesh and calcium. It’s my desire that we sit in this enclosed space together.
The piece features accompanying sound by artist, composer and percussionist Matt Evans. Additional color correcting by video artist Hyung Seok Jeon.
January created as Dancer-in-Residence at ArtCake
December 20, 2020
Created as Dancer-in-Residence at ArtCake. January is a new performance created by Ayano Elson in collaboration with composer Matt Evans and video designer Hyung Seok Jeon.
Double Moon at the Chocolate Factory
December 16, 2018 at 6 PM + 7 PM
Co-presented by Movement Research and the Chocolate Factory
Double Moon is a new performance created by Ayano Elson in collaboration with lighting designer LD DeArmon, dancer Katie Dean, and costumes by Lera Pivavora.
Ayano Elson and Katie Dean at Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church, 11/5/2018; Photo: David Gonsier
