This will be the first time I’m performing in front of an audience in over a year! I’ll perform a new Test Site (#7!) and share the bill with artist Jasmine Hearn. I’ll be joined by Jasmine Chong, Yoshiko Chuma, Sophia Gutchinov, Bliss Lau, Laura Snell, Alicia Tan, and Jing Yu.
The show will take place outside at Downtown Arts / Alpha Omega, 19 East 3rd Street.
Jasmine Hearn shares a short set of three new songs from their soon-to-be-released album, Pleasure Memory. Through movement, sound, and storytelling they wonder/wander how to offer space and time so their body can roam, still, and fly.
Sugar Vendil's Test Sites is an ongoing series of performance pieces that are experiments in process. Each Test Site involves a short-term process and is an exercise in limits and creativity. Blending voice and movement, her new Test Site 7 will be a release of rage and a ritual for joy. Vendil will also perform Test Site 5: Seedlings for voice, movement, and electronics, and other solo music compositions. An AAPI New Yorker, Vendil says she is making the work as "an inelegant, angry, and urgent response to the current moment."
Jasmine Hearn is from the ancestral lands of the Karankawa and Atapake people, now known as Houston, Texas. An interdisciplinary artist, director, choreographer, organizer, teaching artist, and a 2017 Bessie Award-winning performer with Skeleton Architecture, they have crafted and shared collaborative dance-theater performances rooted in identity, memory, and the facilitation of creative space for feelings and fantasy. They are currently a company member with Urban Bush Women and a 2019 Jerome Foundation Jerome Hill Fellow. Hearn has creatively collaborated with multidisciplinary artists Solange Knowles, Alisha B. Wormsley, Staycee Pearl, Holly Bass, slowdanger, BANDPortier, and Jennifer Nagle Myers, who have produced performances at the Guggenheim Museum, the Getty Center, Venice Biennale 2019, New York Live Arts, and the Houston Arts Alliance. Hearn's commitment to dance is an expansive practice that includes performance, collaboration, sound, and garmentry.
Sugar Vendil is a composer, pianist, and interdisciplinary artist based in Lenapehoking/New York City. Her artistic practice is strongly rooted in a rigorous discipline as a musician and has gradually expanded into performance that integrates music, movement, and unconventional approaches to the piano. She is a proud second-generation Filipinx American. Vendil was recently awarded an ACF | Create commission to write a work for Boston-based duo Box Not Found (May 2020) and was awarded a 2020 Fellowship at the National Arts Club. Vendil was a 2019 Artist in Residence at High Concept Labs in Chicago and was awarded a 2019 Chamber Music America commission to write a new work for her ensemble, The Nouveau Classical Project, which she founded in 2008. She was a 2019 resident artist at Mabou Mines and an artist in residence at Target Margin Theater. Vendil has performed at a variety of venues including BAM Fisher, Dixon Place, Knockdown Center's Ready Room, MoMA PS1, and National Sawdust, among others.