Lower Manhattan Cultural Council announces the 23rd annual River To River Festival

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) is pleased to announce the 23rd annual River To River Festival, taking place June 7 – 23, 2024. Celebrating local artists and honoring creative diversity across disciplines, The River To River Festival is Downtown New York City’s leading free summer arts festival. This year’s River To River Festival aligns with LMCC’s 50th-anniversary celebrations.

In honor of this milestone, the 2024 festival features LMCC residency and grants alumni from the Extended Life program working across disciplines, with a captivating array of dance, music, video, installation, and exhibitions that reflects the interdisciplinary, diverse ethos of LMCC. Featuring 13 projects of live art, performances and participatory events (including seven premieres) in public spaces throughout Downtown New York, the 2024 River To River Festival explores themes of resonance, reconsideration and resistance.

River To River 2024 artists include:

Events range from the local and participatory, the open and artistic, to the sweet and memory-laden, as in the cases of Love for NYC Waterways: Stories from the Stoop, in partnership with Billion Oyster Project, a Moth-style storytelling and open mic event that celebrates the legacy of the Blackwater stewards of New York, and Elisabeth Smolarz’s (2012 artist-in-residence) presentation of ice cream flavors inspired by her experiences during her 2012 artist residency on Governors Island.

These flavors will celebrate the friendships and artist communities she formed during that time, as well as the distinctive features of the island itself, such as the weeping willow tree, the lavender fields, and the beloved Governors Island sheep: Flour, Sam, Evening, Chad, and Philip Aries.

Other highlights include Samita Sinha’s June 20 performance of Tremor. This special iteration of Samita Sinha’s Tremor is performed in duet with Cecilia Vicuña. Presented in the historic and resonant space of Federal Hall, Sinha and Vicuña infuse their vibrations and lineages into the dense history and monumentality of the site, opening other ways of sensing, knowing, being, and being together.

Honored this year with LMCC’s 2024 Sam Miller Award for Performing Art, celebrated choreographer Miguel Gutierrez will present THE POWER OF THE BOUNCE on June 7th An interactive, high-energy dance performance complete with group choreography, aerobics, and costumes, come in costume and learn the famous “Aerobicon” dance that Miguel created to Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon” in 2000. Miguel will revive this dance and create a powerful public spectacle reminiscent of the cardiovascularly challenging and spiritually charged but now defunct DEEP AEROBICS technique that he taught and disseminated for ten years.

Doing more than double duty, choreographer mayfield brooks will present two works–whale fall abyss in the cargo hold of the Tall Ship Wavertree, calling up ghosts and ancestors from the intersecting histories of whalers and slave ships, and whale fall reckoning in the Upper Gallery of The Arts Center at Governors Island. Using found objects, sound, light, movement and projection, brooks conjures an abyssal underwater world that transforms the formerly munitions storage warehouse into an imagined site of the decomposed whale.

Both presentations are a culmination of brooks’ project Whale Fall, originally commissioned by Abrons Arts Center and virtually premiered as an experimental dance film in 2021 during the height of the Covid-19 epidemic.

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council 23rd annual River To River Festival, commences on the 7th of June, 2024 until the 23rd June, 2024

©2024 LMCC