Activations
Activations: Friday Night Lights with Gillian Walsh
Saturday, November 16, 2024, 4 pm, Offsite
Event details
Saturday, November 16, 2024
4 pm
Soccer Field at Chelsea Park
450 West 27th Street
New York, New York
Free. RSVP recommended; register here.
Gathered through an open call by Dia and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, the program’s participants met with artist Gillian Walsh for a five-week movement course at the Chelsea Recreation Center. Taking a contemplative approach to dance, Walsh led participants through a series of exercises focused on cultivating sincerity and a sense of their interiority, deemphasizing virtuosic movement and inviting participants to engage personal memory, fantasy, and conjured space.
The resulting choreography, composed collectively, contains movement ranging from the still to the exuberant. On November 16 it is performed at Chelsea Park’s athletic field, a quintessential backdrop of the American imagination.
Gillian Walsh is an artist and choreographer from New York. She works with materiality, immateriality, and the dancer. She often produces stark formal choreographies that utilize stillness and a wide range of source materials. Recent works include Fame Notions, Performance Space New York (2019); May, Gropius Bau, Berlin (2022); and Wilderness, Danspace Project/New York City Players (2023). Walsh regularly collaborates and performs with other artists, most recently Richard Maxwell, Neal Medlyn, and Sarah Michelson. She completed her Master of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary, New York.
About the program series
Activations is a series of interdisciplinary public programs designed by artists in response to civic spaces in New York. Each activation invites participants to encounter a ready-made site through the lens of an artistic practice, reimagining them as spaces of creative possibility. All are welcome to participate.