For two nights, Judson Church hosted the Crossroads Series with varied programming each evening. On Tuesday, April 23rd, three very different performances were presented by Pioneers Go East Collective, a self-identified ‘radical queer laboratory collective of performing and visual artists dedicated to dance-theater and video art to empower the LGBTQ experience.’ The curated performances highlighted the unexpected and served as an excellent introduction to Judson Church, each artist’s art-making process, and the vast scope of possibilities for the physical space.
The series, featuring queer artists’ new works, was part of a fundraiser for the Manhattan space, with raffle and fun art prizes like gorgeous ceramics and paintings. Hearing the word fundraiser one may begrudgingly think ‘here comes something flashy or over the top’ but the pieces chosen leaned into a certain heaviness and moments of quiet that surprised and stunned. With a space like Judson Church, the artists from this series were able to show, without complex light design or bright costumes, just how important it is to support and sustain spaces that showcase work at all stages of exploration and development.
If it’s your first time visiting Judson Church, you’ll notice the blank open stage and lofty ceilings, grand archways made of marble and stained glass window portraits of Queer figures like James Baldwin and Sylvia Rivera. A tough spot for acoustic but a perfect venue to rely on silence or heavy reverberation. It’s a space that feels so open that the performers are almost too exposed which is why the first performances’ use of the space felt so satisfyingly effecting. The night began with Orlando Hernández and their ensemble of dancers – Leonardo Sandoval, Lucas Santana, Isabella Serricella, and Liberty Styles.
Loud taps from the balcony behind the audience propelled the start of the program. Silence. More loud taps. Four sets of feet. A pause before movement onto the stairs. An invitation to look or to close your eyes and lean into the fear of the unknown coming. The vast space started to feel cozier and become known . Loud sharp sounds approach the audience from behind before crossing into our sightlines. Masked figures tapping to tell us something imperative, something sharp, something perceived more clearly without words. ORLANDO HERNÁNDEZ began the evening with such command of the space, undaunted by the venue size, harkening to something instinctive and ancestral with their sharp performance of wooden mask-clad dancers. The description of “Too soon to discover planets, too late to discover islands” implied something otherworldly, using the “technologies of tap dance and mask work to tell the story of two people who arrive in a new land,” as written by the show’s choreographer.
The wooden masks and fluid grounded motion felt earthen, familiar, and human-like, as if watching an alternate universe where humans developed heads too large to speak and could only communicate through the sounds of their feet. Big sounds from big faces in a big quiet room. A welcome to the evening in the form of a warning of later shocks to come.
Next, a quiet and intense shift into Angie Pittman’s piece: a silent solo dance entitled “Black Life Chord Changes”. No backing track or ambient fill. Quiet except for the shifts of a twisting body or the friction of a bare foot against the floor. Like the piece before, this performance displays multiple cultures in one body. Pittman describes her dance, modern and African and liturgical and acrobatic as “Blackly so.” She utters a sound a few times sparsely throughout her performance to interrupt your thoughts as you follow her figure, closely, dressed in black, against the light stage backdrop.
Full of contrast and cohesion, this piece felt like a word search puzzle. The information is all there yet intentionally obscured and woven, elements crisscrossing in front of you, inviting you to catch up to speed. Pittman names improvisation as an essential element of this work. Some moments feel like an artist playing, exploring new combinations in the studio, while others feel more lived in and formed to the artist. With Judson’s blank slate of a stage, you find yourself watching the movement while also imagining how this work could grow.
Then the lights were dimmed in a shift to physical stillness for the third and final piece. In this “Special Performance,” syd island’s vocal performance and looping turned the audience into a state of cozy and reverent listening. They sat surrounded by their gear, a collection of pedals and cables, and a microphone. As layered as the works before it but slower and more tender. No dance, no movement, just sound. The simplicity and stillness of this raw vocal performance was a deliberate and necessary grounding of the evening. While the series began loud and staccato, syd island’s work felt soft, dreamlike, and blended.
A single repeated phrase – your heart is on fire with a desire for a new world, your soul is ablaze with a hope I can only imagine. Lyrics that give you space to fill it with your own meaning. Where do you have hope for change in your world? They invited you to see that from your seat, while merely listening to the musings of hope and imagination, you could dream up and define a world of your own. Yet again, Judson Church itself felt like such a fitting environment for this type of performance as the walls and high ceilings created a reverberating score, crafting a full and round world for the piece. With their eyes closed and breath slow, syd island led the audience into a meditative and deeply self reflective state.
By the time the Judson staff returned to remind us all of the fundraiser and the raffle winners, it seemed like we had all been brought back to the beginning of the night. The end of show announcement startled us because it sounded so normal that it felt out of place from the strange yet wonderful sounds from the space the audience had inhabited for the last hour. Reality just beyond the reach of the tapping of own moving feet, the clunky motion of shuffling tote bags disturbing the evening’s meditative fluidity. Big sounds in a big room moving us all to have big feelings.
Read more about this program here.
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