KYL/D Sanctuario, Esperanza Teatro, 2023.
The Study of movement in Modern Dance. Contemporary and modern dance entered into a conversation with a movement of avant-garde artists in American art. Performance Art from the Renaissance artists created themed social gatherings to “expand the scope of expression.” (Greggory Battock, The Art of Performance: A Critical Anthology). On colorful construction paper, Kyle Abraham’s choreography adapted from viewing online the New York City Ballet, When We Fell. It captured that feeling of being in nature, filmed by Marie Helfant. To the 2023, Arts on Center Stage with Kun-Yang Lin and Dancers. As well as, Annie Wilson’s Always The Hour, a full-immersion into installation and performance art at the IceBox Project Space.
Drawing from the Theater in 2017, the Met Live Opera on screen, The Pearl Fisher. Then, it was a new investigation for classical music genre, and Curtis Opera staged a rare production of Dr. Atomic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra with Yannick Nezet-Séguin’s presentation of Blue Beard’s Castle. Micah Gleason, the Fellow Conductor at Curtis Institute of Music in 2024. Thanks to the support of other artists, acknowledging the collaboration between live performance and its audience provides the chance to develop the sketches further. Looking at the medium, painting was an essential influence for large scale canvases. The Secret Museum of Mankind collages titled, A Color Coded History, after the BlackStar Film Festival 2022. And the oil painting inspired by Ocean Waves by Kun-Yang Lin, and dance artist WALLY Carbonell’s solo at Arts on Center City Stage at Dilworth Plaza.
WHYSEEART.
Looking back, the content from contemporaries provide artwork in critique of our culture. They present concepts and ideas that push boundaries, that define a genre, for multiple modes and mediums play on our reality. A place for the audience to be in a shared space while we recontextualize for ourselves, the influence that inspired the artwork.
When We Fell
Choreography by Kyle Abraham for NYCBallet
We make TheArt World to explore the influence for the art, and for audiences to feel free to the imagination to take them out of their ordinary life. It’s in the art salons, soirées, the theatrical arts, and in the dance studios where artists influence begins to take shape. Dreams where things fall into place, once awake and the true nature of our dreams come to intricate webs of symbols. Take the course of dreams and waking life then to break away from the trends of everything you ever knew to be what it is. The influence of everything is in the imagination of the world, and artists begin to tell signs of reality through new lens of recreating their surroundings. What they know, compared to what they don’t know, and the nature of the human being in a complex intelligent relationship with the self, the other, as seen from afar, proxy, or first-hand. The influence is sketching from the performance, from here the concept is a prepped, for color and texture, and content.
In some cases, I have had the pleasure of meeting artists, like Valerie Green, in the audience at the Joyce Theater for Fouad Boussouf’s Näss, in 2022 L’Alliance New York Crossing the Line Festival. Other times, following the performance of an artist, like Kyle Abraham at the NYCBallet. In conversation my work with other artists feels like a collaboration at a distance, like Jeanne Balibar from 2018 Crossing the Line Festival, then later going to seeing the screening of her role in Memoria in 2023. Meeting with the artists too, can be in a way, showing gratitude for the artwork they’ve done. This has led to a signature series of drawings, where the most important contemporary artists today will have signature sketches of their art work, like portraits of the artist.
I revisited the show to see Chris Davis once again in December 2024 for the parody holiday show known as The NutCracker: The One-Man Show. I experienced once before in 2023, Davis performed an array of one man shows in the theaters in Philadelphia. While show running the summer festival, So-Low Festival in 2018, Die-Cast showed “Gintry,” and Almanac Circus, Your Sunday’s Best, a special comedy show held at a local drinking hole known for actors frequenting, as well as a look inside of Fergies Pub with Jenna Kuerzie’s Johny Depp retrospective.
Yuja Wang, Curtis Symphony Orchestra 2025
The Curtis Symphony Orchestra is something that offers a music conservatory to the most gifted classically trained musicians. The events interest me in how the programs are designed to prepare its constituents to be able to evaluate such art . A composition by EinoJuhani Ruatavaara played by Yuja Wang to a point of rage or confusion, an art performance that transmutes plot or narrative. We to listen as the duration unfolds in the agility or breadth of conceptualism by the pianist.
In 2025, I made my first appearance at the Association of Performance Art Professionals New York, a premier event for the industry of performing artists. It is with special thanks to Valerie Green at Dance Entropy that made it possible for us to be there to draw from an excerpt of her choreography, EVERYTHING. The continued partnership between artists, and the influence of one art form to another stands for a social circle of creatives. In following the passion in artists, the work they put themselves into, poured their heart, vulnerable to critics, audiences, and our reception is the culture. That is, our society made by ecosystems of influence, and the signature artist series are documents of their lasting mark on society.
COmedy
Your Sunday’s Best
At Quiqs Pub in Philadelphia, a gathering of local actors and creatives.
Joseph Jiggetts |
Ashley Spearman & Khalif Troy
| Jonté Desiré, Bruce Canada, and Khalif Troy
