Video documentation from the Zoom presentation of Past, Present & Future VIII on November 14, 2022 at 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm ET, where Franklin Furnace introduced the 2022-23 FF FUND recipients. Each artist described their newly funded projects and explained the influences, thought-processes, and practices culminating in their eventual performances. Emcees Martha Wilson and Harley Spiller hosted this unique annual opportunity to listen to and engage with emerging performance artists of the highest caliber.
Franklin Furnace FUND for Performance Art 2022-23 grant recipients are:
- Helixx C. Armageddon (New York, NY)*
- Anna Costa e Silva & Nina Terra (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
- Zach Dorn (Los Angeles, CA)
- GOODW.Y.N. (New York, NY)*
- Kiyo Gutiérrez (Zapopan, Mexico)
- Nile Harris (Brooklyn, NY)*
- Robert Hickerson (Brooklyn, NY)*
- Natasha Iqbal Jozi Dani (Munich, Germany)
- Cheyenne LeGrande ᑭᒥᐊᐧᐣ (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada)
- Tsedaye Makonnen (Washington, DC)
- Jaime Sunwoo (Brooklyn, NY)*
- Asia Stewart (Brooklyn, NY)*
- Yuliya Tsukerman (Brooklyn, NY)*
*FUND award supported by Jerome Foundation.
Image Description: A digital collage including 13 square images representing each FUND recipient. The background is a pink-and-white gradient. The text reads Past, Present & Future VIII, Virtual event: November 14, 2022, 6:30 PM ET. RSVP @Franklinfurnace.org. Names of all recipients are listed on the lower left side of the poster.
Poster designed by Yunjia Yuan, Designer in Residence, 2022.
- FRANKLIN FURNACE FUND
2022-23 Recipients
This season marks the 37th anniversary of the Franklin Furnace FUND. Initiated in 1985 with the support of Jerome Foundation, Franklin Furnace has annually awarded grants to early career artists selected by peer panel review to enable them to prepare major performance art works in New York. This season, Franklin Furnace received 328 applications.
This year’s peer artist review panel met on July 26, 27 and 28, 2022 and decided to award thirteen $4,500 grants from support Franklin Furnace received from Jerome Foundation, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Helixx C. Armageddon
//https://www.houseofhelixx.com
Project Description
The Museum of My Heart Project is an interactive in-person audio and visual performance art experience focused on mental health healing via the ideas of letting go and moving forward.
Biography
Helixx C. Armageddon is a storyteller intrigued with exploring the human condition through performance art and experimental/avant-garde Hip-Hop. She weaves together poetry, music and theater to shift her audiences from observers to participants.
Known for impassioned performances, Helixx channels a space for community, connection and dialogue. For her, words are powerful and create more than narrative; words create action and momentum towards a more just world.
Helixx has performed in notable venues around New York City including Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Bowery Poetry Club, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, Hammerstein Ballroom, Knitting Factory, Gene Frankel Theatre, Howl! Happening, Blue Note Jazz Club, Tibet House US and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art.
Currently, she is a 4heads artist-in-residence on Governor’s Island and is working on House of Helixx: Book 2. You can find her performing in New York City art galleries, DIY venues, theaters and laundromats.
@helixxwashere
This artist was supported by Jerome Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.
Image Descriptions: 1 Helixx wire frame copy, photo by Helixx C. Armageddon; 2. Helixx Note to Self, photo by Helixx C. Armageddon; 3. Railroad, photo by Honeydark Studios (www.honeydarkstudios.com or Instagram: @honeydarkstudios).
Anna Costa e Silva & Nina Terra
Project Description
shrieking, wailing, sobbing (or raw emotions in general) is a vocal-text-visual live performance by Anna Costa e Silva and Nina Terra. The performance experiments with a diversity of intense female vocal tones that exist in a hybrid space between pain, pleasure, joy and emotional discharge, combined with spoken words and an immersive visual experience with light projections. Having as a starting point the texts The Gender of Sound by Anne Carson and The Scars Clan by Clarissa Pinkola, this work is about tremors that the female voice might produce and the need to break silences.
Biography
Anna Costa e Silva (Rio de Janeiro, 1988) works with constructed situations between people that challenge the limits between reality and fiction, self and other, experience and memory. Interested in the states between awareness and sleep, the suspension of time, the silenced shouts of women. Her projects happen in the intersections between visual, performing arts and social practice and unfold in installations, films, or ephemeral situations. Anna holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the SVA, NY, and has won awards such as FOCO ArtRio, American Austrian Award and was a PIPA prize nominee. In 2022, she is part of the Mercosul Biennial and winner of Terremoto Ubisoft artist residency. Her work has been shown at BienalSur (Buenos Aires), Art in Odd Places (NY), Pivô, Superfície Gallery, Oi Futuro, A Gentil Carioca (Brazil), among others and is part of public collections such as Rio de Janeiro Museum of Art. She teaches ArtLife Practices at Parque Lage School of Visual Arts. /
Nina Terra is an Brazilian Artist-Therapist who lives in the city of Paraty, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Psychologist, Art Therapist, graduated in dance technique by Angel Vianna, Yoga instructor, specialist in Pedagogy of Cooperation and Collaborative Methodologies. Creator of practices Corpo Oráculo, Corpo Potência Criativa e DANÇA-RITO. She has been singing for 11 years and practicing the body-voice connection. She is a body trainer, performs individual consultations and facilitates experiences of connection, awareness and expansion. Develops relational and ritual art performances relating the state of flow, body-voice and the present moment.
This artist was supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.
Image Descriptions: 1. And the buildings were growing taller, and I could not see what was behind, 2019, video installation/performance that comes from the experience of listening to dreams during presidential elections that elected Bolsonaro; 2. Tremor-try, 2021, performance in collaboration between Nina Terra and Anna Costa e Silva; 3. Purpura, 2018, performative experience of one-on-one artlife encounters in consumption spaces in the city. Images courtesy of the artist.
Zach Dorn
Project Description
Long Live Livia is an experimental performance that explores CGI posthumous performance as a vehicle for grieving. In 2001, The Sopranos resurrected actor Nancy Marchand through an uncanny CG deepfake. This scene is the first instance of digital posthumous performance, eventually followed by the popular Tupac hologram in 2011. After experiencing the premature deaths of my extended family due to a genetic mutation, BRCA2, Marchand’s digital resurrection inspired me to create a time-based performance where two actors cook a family recipe with me while their faces are live-projected and deepfaked with the faces of my deceased mother and grandmother.
Biography
Zach Dorn is a filmmaker, writer, and performing artist who creates miniature melodramas that explore the underbelly of childhood nostalgia through the disappointed eyeballs of adulthood. With puppets, paper dioramas, and a grotesque DIY craftsmanship, Dorn builds interweaving narratives tangled in homesickness and pop culture. Dorn’s multimedia puppet performances have premiered at Ars Nova (New York), St. Ann’s Warehouse (New York), and REDCAT (Los Angeles). His work has been funded by The Jim Henson Foundation, The Heinz Endowments, and the Artist Foundation of San Antonio. His first stop-motion film, Charlotte, premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival.
In 2016, theater and movie director Julie Taymor sent Dorn to Japan to explore the use of automata in Shinto rituals. While in Tokyo, he apprenticed under psychoanalyst turned experimental theater director Kuro Tanino. Dorn received his MFA in Experimental Animation from Calarts in 2021.
This artist was supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.
Image Descriptions: 1 & 2. Let’s Prank Call Each Other, 2018. Images courtesy of the artist.
GOODW.Y.N.
//https://www.flickr.com/photos/187014276@N04/albums/72157713630057786
Project Description
The project Ain’t I a Woman (?/!): The Dinner Party II is a direct sequel to the performance Ain’t I a Woman (?/!): The Dinner Party that was performed in August 2018. The project consists of blocking off a city block on the Westside of Harlem during the summer 2023, in order to create a dinner party setting for 100 Queer folk and our allies. Equipped with a sound system and outdoor camera and projection system to live broadcast my improvised body-movement performance to the guests and pedestrians overlooking the gathering. This is a street-intervention/protest against the “Don’t Say Gay” climate.
Biography
Nicole Goodwin aka GOODW.Y.N. is the author of Warcries, and the poetic sequel Warcrimes as well as the photographic essay book Ain’t I a Woman (?/!): I Give of Myself based on the five year iterations of Ain’t I a Woman (?/!). They are a finalist for the CUE Foundation’s 2022 Public Programs Fellowship, as well as the 2020 Pushcart Nominee, 2018-2019 Franklin Furnace FUND Recipient, the 2018 Ragdale Alice Judson Hayes Fellowship Recipient, 2017 EMERGENYC Hemispheric Institute Fellow and the 2013- 2014 Queer Art Mentorship Queer Art Literary Fellow. They published the articles Talking with My Daughter… and Why is this Happening in Your Life… in The New York Times’ parent blog Motherlode. Additionally, their work Ain’t I a Woman (?/!): Poems was long-listed for The Black Spring Press Group’s The Christopher Smart-Joan Alice Prize for 2020, and their work Desert Flowers was shortlisted and selected for performance by the Women’s Playwriting International Conference in Cape Town, South Africa in 2015.
This artist was supported by Jerome Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. Jerome Foundation support of the Franklin Furnace Fund is restricted to artists living in the five boroughs of New York City or the state of Minnesota.
Image Description: 1-3. Ain’t I a Woman (?/!): The Dinner Party, August 2018. Images courtesy of the artist.
Kiyo Gutiérrez
//http://www.kiyogutierrez.com
Project Description
River Healers is a site-specific performance where three women toss their hair into a NY river from a bridge. Their “hair” consists of a hat that has attached to it several feet of light textile that will be released into the river. This textile is dyed with red cabbage, a natural PH indicator substance that changes color when in contact with water. The river’s PH level revealed through this intimate gesture, defines if life can or cannot thrive in the water. The hats and documentation of the intervention will be exhibited through an installation. River Healers build a closer relationship between river and citizens.
Biography
Kiyo Gutiérrez is a Mexican performance artist based in Guadalajara. She studied history because she wanted to understand where she was standing. But she couldn’t find any answers in heteropatriarchal narratives. Then she discovered her path was in the body and its potential as a tool of resistance. She started doing performance art as a reaction against the brutal Mexican reality, which is a violent one, full of femicides, disappearances, and a constant and insatiable looting towards nature. She draws on multiple mediums including video, photography, dance, poetry, sculpture and sound. Ecofeminist, provocative, earthy, political, her performance pieces question established order and power, and explore the ties between female oppression and the destructive exploitation of Planet Earth.
Kiyo performs often in public spaces and has participated in International Performance Festivals and exhibitions in Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, Spain and the United States. She also participated in Debates, an editorial project for Colección Cisneros and is a Fellow at the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics of Georgetown University. She is currently exploring the possibility of multispecies alliances and is working in collaboration with more than 40 thousand honey bees and other pollinators.@kiyogutierrez
This artist was supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.
Image Descriptions: 1 – 3. Rio Grande Santiago, photos by Pistor Orendain. Images courtesy of the artist.
Nile Harris
//https://vimeo.com/nileharris
Project Description
this house is not a home sets an improvised choreographic score inside of and around a sound-responsive inflatable bounce castle. Interweaving sonic feedback as a malleable material, the unique vocal utterances of the cast are recorded and live mixed to create a biometrically unique musical composition that cannot be repeated the same. The piece is made in collaboration with performer Malcolm-x Betts and sound designers slowdanger.
Biography
Nile Harris is a performer and director of live works of art. He has done a few things and hopes to do a few more, God willing. (IG: @nileharris)
This artist was supported by Jerome Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. Jerome Foundation support of the Franklin Furnace Fund is restricted to artists living in the five boroughs of New York City or the state of Minnesota.
Image Descriptions: 1. Untitled, 2022, Photo by Malcolm-x Betts; 2. This house is not a home, photo by Grant Conversano; A Monkey on One’s Back (love laboratory), 2017. Images courtesy of the artist.
Robert Hickerson
//https://roberthickerson.com/
Project Description
As we move more online, our digital identity becomes interwoven with the ads we are served, which are targeted based on our online activity. Target Audience is a project that uses performance, immersive installation, and live edited and live scored video to tell the story of a vampire advertising agency, underlining the absurdity of what we are being asked to buy and how we are being asked to buy it. Taking place within a recreation of a traditional workplace, performers will activate the piece, with each viewing being tailored through selective live editing and live scoring.
Biography
aquarius, rising leo, moon gemini since 1991
bfa, fine arts, parsons school of design, 2013 based in brooklyn since 2010
five foot, ten and a half inches
This artist was supported by Jerome Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. Jerome Foundation support of the Franklin Furnace Fund is restricted to artists living in the five boroughs of New York City or the state of Minnesota.
Image Descriptions: 1 – 3. Target Audience, 2022. Images courtesy of the artist.
Natasha Iqbal Jozi Dani
Project Description
In ancient Hellenistic period and Islamic cultures, women who were wives or mothers were considered virtuous and honorable enough to perform in public religious rituals. Where religion provided women collective autonomy over their bodies it also segregated them based on their gender and social status. This project examines one such ritual, Wudu ( bathing) to explore shared vulnerability, critique political and social hierarchies, and religious prejudices around the female body in public spaces. For this performance 40-50 women will be invited to perform collective rituals of bathing in various public locations in the city using milk, indigo dye and gold leaf.
Biography
Natasha Jozi (b. 1988, Islamabad, Pakistan) is a Munich based visual thinker, performance artist and writer, interested in the performative self, collective experience and intersection of science and the spiritual body.
Jozi has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including On Camera: Performing the Self curated with ECC Performance, Venice, Italy (2022), Open Encounters, ArtCO Gallery, Berlin (2022), Karachi Biennale (2019), Loudspeaker, Vasl PK (2019), Beneath the Surface, MAWA Canada (2019), Mohatta Palace (2016), National Art Gallery (2016), Satrang Gallery (2015), International Festival of Video Art (Venice). She was part of various festivals including Theertha Performance Festival – Sri Lanka (2019), Performance Art Intensive – The Tetley, UK (2017), BIPAF – Chicago (2015), International Festival of Video Art (Venice), MagnanMetz (NYC), Index Art Center (NJ), Panoply Performance Laboratory (NYC), Delaware Center for Contemporary Art (Delaware), LAABF (NYC), La Mama (NYC).
In 2017 Jozi founded House Ltd. an independent initiative that explores the notion of ‘City as a performing organism’ and works towards generating a discourse around performance art in Pakistan. Her curatorial projects include Room of Thought, an online collaboration with In_Process, India; Body Becoming at Olomopolo Media, Lahore; We Are All Mad Here at National Art Gallery, Pakistan and We’ve Been waiting for you at Bari Studios, Lahore.
Jozi is also a freelance writer and frequent contributor for the art magazine ArtNow Pakistan. She is a Fulbright Scholar, with a Masters in Studio Arts majoring in Performance art from Montclair School for Arts, USA and Bachelors in Fine Arts from Fatima Jinnah Women University, Pakistan.
This artist was supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.
Image Descriptions: 1. Seven Seas, 2019; 2. I whispered and Pulsated with the Waves, 2019; 3. The Way You Touch Me, 2022. Images courtesy of the artist.
Cheyenne Rain LeGrande ᑭᒥᐊᐧᐣ
//https://www.instagram.com/cheyennerainlegrande/?hl=en
Project Description
The performance I will be creating is called Mullyanne nîmito ᓃᒥᐤ. Nîmito in Cree (nêhiyawêwin) translates to she dances. The performance will include two objects. One is a hybrid moccasin platform shoe and the other a bepsi/beer tab shawl. Mullyanne nîmito ᓃᒥᐤ will explore my Nehiyaw femme identity. Exploring ideas around Nehiyaw alien, protection, movement as healing, ancestral knowledge, traditional practice and Nehiyaw fashion. I will also create a sound piece using my language to create a Nehiyaw (Cree) pop song that will play as I perform.
Biography
Cheyenne Rain LeGrande ᑭᒥᐊᐧᐣ is a Nehiyaw Isko artist, from Bigstone Cree Nation. She currently resides in Amiskwaciy Waskahikan also known as Edmonton, Alberta. Cheyenne graduated from Emily Carr University with her BFA in Visual Arts in 2019. Her work often explores history, knowledge and traditional practices. Through the use of her body and language, she speaks to the past, present and future. Cheyenne’s work is rooted in the strength to feel, express and heal. Bringing her ancestors with her, she moves through installation, photography, video, sound, and performance art.
This artist was supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.
Image Descriptions: 1 – 3 photos courtesy of the artist Cheyenne Rain LeGrandeᑭᒥᐊᐧᐣ, videography by Eli Hirtle.
Tsedaye Makonnen
Project Description
Through performance and sculptural textile experimentation, this project’s purpose is to create a Black spiritual network around the world that re-calibrates the energy towards something positive and life-affirming while investigating the inherent anti-blackness that immigrants of color face while experiencing forced migration, fleeing natural disasters, climate change and state-sanctioned violence. This work seeks to activate and map a web of protection around & by Black femmes. Using collaboration as practice, I seek to expand the methodology of the Astral Sea series to create and perform in concert with other movement-based artists. This project seeks to research the underlying themes of Black migration, Black refuge, protection, and healing for Black people, abstracting indigenous Black diasporic spiritual designs to create new codes and languages.
Biography
Tsedaye Makonnen is an artist, mother and birthworker of Ethiopian descent. Her studio practice primarily focuses on intersectional feminism, reproductive health and migration.
In 2019 Tsedaye was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. In 2021 her light sculptures were acquired by the Smithsonian for their permanent collection and she published a book titled ‘Black Women as/and the Living Archive’. Tsedaye is the recipient of a permanent large-scale public art commission for Providence, R.I. This Fall she will be performing at the Venice Biennale for Simone Leigh’s Loophole Retreat and researching as Clark Art Institute’s Futures Fellow. In 2023, Tsedaye will be exhibiting at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is currently represented by Addis Fine Art. She lives between DC and London with her partner and children.
Additionally she has performed at the Venice Biennale, Art Basel Miami, Art on the Vine (Martha’s Vineyard), Chale Wote Street Art Festival (Ghana), El Museo del Barrio, Fendika Cultural Center (Ethiopia), Festival International d’Art Performance (Martinique), Queens Museum, the Smithsonian’s & more. Her work has been featured in Artsy, NYTimes, Vogue, BOMB, Hyperallergic & more. Other exhibitions include Artspace New Haven, Mattress Factory, Photoville, NYU Tisch, Walters Art Museum, CFHill gallery, National Gallery of Art, UNTITLED Art Fair, 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, Park Avenue Armory, National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Momentary, Art Dubai & more.
This artist was supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.
Image Descriptions: 1. Astral Sea II Washington DC, 2020; 2. Astral Sea I, 2019 ; 3. Long Wharf Pier ft. Astral Sea IV, 2022. Images courtesy of the artist.
Asia Stewart
//https://www.asiastewart.com/performance
Project Description
Fabric Softener is an hour-long ritual: a cross between a blood-strewn baptism and funeral. Punctuated by outbursts of spirituals and excerpts from a 1977 archival recording of Toni Morrison reading Song of Solomon, the performance meditates on intergenerational trauma and Black inheritance. Morrison’s reading describes the special wisdom that circulates between three characters: Pilate, her daughter Reba, and granddaughter Hagar. They form a family much like the one Asia Stewart grew up in where “women produce[d] women who produce[d] women [without] men.” Throughout the performance, Stewart’s gestures, movement, and voice become intertwined with Pilate, Reba, and Hagar’s story and enact the “litany of growing up” as a Black woman in the United States.
Biography
Asia Stewart is a Brooklyn-based performance artist whose conceptual work centers the body as a living archive. After receiving degrees in the social sciences from Cambridge and Harvard University, she has sought ways to transform the language specific to studies of race, gender, sexuality, and diaspora into materials that can be felt and worn on the body. As a National YoungArts Winner in Musical Theater and a former National Arts Policy Roundtable Fellow with Americans for the Arts, Stewart uses her past experiences on stage to inject her work with a heightened sense of theatricality.
Stewart routinely questions how she can best document her performances and represent movement and physicality across mediums. Her works in video and installation have been exhibited at venues across the United States, including the Mercury Store, Untitled Space, NARS Foundation, Goodyear Arts, A.I.R. Gallery, Kellen Gallery, and Anthology Film Archives. Her first series of prints is also now held in the permanent collection of the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC.
This artist was supported by Jerome Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. Jerome Foundation support of the Franklin Furnace Fund is restricted to artists living in the five boroughs of New York City or the state of Minnesota.
Image Descriptions: 1 – 3 . Fabric Softener, 2022, photos by Elyse Mertz.
Jaime Sunwoo
Project Description
Embodied is an interview-based performance project that reflects on how individuals experience race in America – a survey of reflections, desires, insecurities, fears, and defenses as people analyze their perception of self and others. Through movement, sound, and verbatim performance, performers embody the accounts of fifty-five interviewees all responding to a single prompt: “Describe a time you were acutely aware of your race.”
Biography
Jaime Sunwoo is a Korean American multidisciplinary artist from Brooklyn, New York working in visual art, theater, film, and public art. Her works connect personal narratives to global histories through surreal storytelling. She studied art at Yale University, and was a fellow for Ping Chong and Company and The Laundromat Project. Her work has been presented at Park Avenue Armory, Abrons Art Center, BAX, JACK, The Tank, Flux Factory, Art in Odd Places, Gallery Korea at KCCNY, Open Source Gallery, and Westbeth Gallery. She has led workshops, given lectures, and joined panel discussions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Food and Drink, Yale University, New York University, The Wang Center at Stony Brook University, and Mills College. She was a resident artist for HB Studio Rehearsal Space Residency and through her production company Free Rein Projects, she has received awards from the Queens Council on the Arts’ Artist Commissioning Program, Asian Women Giving Circle, NYC Women’s Fund, MVRP Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Fund, The Laundromat Project, and The Jim Henson Foundation for Specially Processed American Me, a performance reflecting on the significance of SPAM in the Asian American community. Dixon Place, Ping Chong and Company, and Free Rein Projects presented the world premiere of Specially Processed American Me at Dixon Place in New York City in 2022.
This artist was supported by Jerome Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. Jerome Foundation support of the Franklin Furnace Fund is restricted to artists living in the five boroughs of New York City or the state of Minnesota.
Image Descriptions: 1 – 4. Embodied, 2022, photos by Daniel Davila.
Yuliya Tsukerman
Project Description
Remedy is an evening-length theater piece by Yuliya Tsukerman, with an original score by Thomas Echols. In Remedy, a nameless protagonist conjures up ways of coping with mental illness, chronic pain, and everyday suffering, as well as of grieving a profound loss of culture and connection, by inventing her own remedies out of words and objects (none of which seem to work properly). These segments include a remedy for loneliness, a remedy for the grief of losing respect for your parents, a remedy for discovering you are ugly in more ways than you’ve realized, and a remedy for crying your eyes out over dumb shit.
Biography
Yuliya Tsukerman is a Brooklyn-based playwright, puppet maker, and teaching artist working in theater and film. Her plays have been performed at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Mana Contemporary, The Brick, and on Governors Island. Violent Mercies, her trilogy of short marionette films, has shown in festivals all over the world. Recently, she’s been a playwright-in-residence at New Perspectives Theatre Company, as well as an artist-in-residence at LMCC’s Arts Center and the St. Ann’s Warehouse Puppet Lab, and a NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Playwriting/Screenwriting.
This artist was supported by Jerome Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the friends and members of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. Jerome Foundation support of the Franklin Furnace Fund is restricted to artists living in the five boroughs of New York City or the state of Minnesota.
Image Descriptions: 1 – 3. Remedy, 2022, photos courtesy of the artist.
2022 Peer Review Panelists: Jessica Elaine Blinkhorn, Billy X. Curmano, Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo, Rosamond S. King and Verónica Peña.
This project is made possible with funds from Jerome Foundation, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.