Ilya Vidrin: Everything You Do Matters, No Matter What You Do
05/01/22-09/15/22
New Museum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
212.219.1222
New Museum Presents the 2022 Artist Residency: “Ilya Vidrin: Everything You Do Matters, No Matter What You Do” With Participatory Workshops in July and World Premiere of New Live Performance Work in September 2022.
The New Museum Department of Education and Public Engagement presents “Ilya Vidrin: Everything You Do Matters, No Matter What You Do,” the Museum’s 2022 summer artist residency. Foregrounding the Museum’s year-round commitment to contemporary art and growth through inquiry, the New Museum Artist Residency supports an artist or collective each year to develop and present performance, participatory, or time-based art engaged in questioning, learning, and working towards a better society.
For the 2022 New Museum Artist Residency, movement artist and researcher Ilya Vidrin investigates the concept of partnering and the labor of physical care through public programs including discussions, performances, and a series of experimental workshops taking place from June through September 2022.
Working at the intersection of performing arts, philosophy, and interactive media, Vidrin collaborates with trained and untrained dancers to explore the possibilities of community- and care-oriented—rather than individual- and results-oriented—dance and movement.
While most academic discourse around somatic (or bodily) knowledge, therapy, movement, and meditation center the individual physical experience, Vidrin’s research considers the social potential for a more bodily understanding of community care, focusing on the ways we move through and take up space with others.
Creating scores for iterative, intimate movement, Vidrin nurtures conditions for partners to search within themselves, one another, and in their shared connections to interrogate how meaningful relations are experienced. Partners co-develop and co-discover bodily knowledge, and in the process create new ways of being in space together. Rather than keeping in step with efficiency-oriented value systems, Vidrin’s vision of “Somatic Partnering”rejects the usual standards of physical expertise. In this redefinition, typical standards of excellence in movement—particular athleticism, rhythmic alignment, or visual lines, for example—are transformed into embodied processes that cultivate and sustain mutual aid.
Across workshops, conversations, and performances with trained and untrained dancers, Vidrin’s residency will explore the possibility of communicating aspects of embodied trust, empathy, consent, and agency in partnering studies. The first of these conversations, held on June 9 at the New Museum, explored Somatic Partnering, a bodily technique that brings deep attention to language, health, and care within and between participants.
That discussion between Vidrin and guest panelists Bonnie Wong, director of the Neuropsychology Program in the Frontotemporal Disorders Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital; Mario Alberto Zambrano, Associate Director of Dance at The Juilliard School; and Hyperion Çaca Yvaire, the Terran Shield and Community Conservation Co-Director for the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust (NEFOC), is now available to view online here.
“Ilya Vidrin: Everything You Do Matters, No Matter What You Do,” the 2022 New Museum Artist Residency program, is organized by Andrew Westover, Keith Haring Director of Education and Public Engagement, and Emily Mello, former Senior Associate Director of Education.
UPCOMING IN-PERSON PROGRAMS
Somatic Partnering Workshop
Friday, July 15, 2 p.m.
This two-hour workshop offers a platform to explore the roots of physical interaction in a world increasingly disconnected from the body. Through guided physical practice, shared reflection, and facilitated dialogue, participants will combine the practice of dancing together with questions designed to challenge and enhance interaction. The unique approach includes exercises to engage with subtle elements of relational movement, including touch, proximity, and mutual gaze. No prior dance experience is necessary, all bodies and physical abilities welcome. This program has limited capacity; RSVP is required.
Friday, September 9, 7 p.m.
Saturday, September 10, 4 p.m.
Saturday, September 10, 7 p.m.
The world premiere of Tikkun, a performance investigating social responsibility and communal care, represents the culmination of the 2022 New Museum Artist Residency “Ilya Vidrin: Everything You Do Matters, No Matter What You Do,” with three performances on September 9 and 10, 2022.
The program title Tikkun references Vidrin’s Jewish heritage, critically examining the theological concept of tikkun olam [repairing the world]. This work draws on questions of duty, agency, and consent. Together, six performers manipulate gestural loops and layers to explore an emergent logic of care through shared movement. Tikkun‘s soundscape features symphonic fragments paired with controlled, modular experiments that provide opportunities for mutual listening and co-creative responses. Vidrin will perform with collaborators Eric Seligman (trumpet, vocals, electronics), Mel Hsu (cello, vocals, electronics), and movement artists Jessi Stegall, Cameron Surh, and Niki Farahani.
This program has limited capacity; RSVP is required.
©2022 New Museum, Ilya Vidrin
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