July 20-26, 2015

A week of collaborative investigations into the female body and nature, in a non-judgemental and feminist environment at new rural performance-specific venue, Rosekill Farm

Friday July 24 Meet the Artist Dinner
7:30 Dinner
8:30 - 10pm Projection Presentation of Essential Departures artists' work & Bonfire

Saturday July 25 Essential Departures: Public Performance Event
12-4pm Swimming and boating in lake & strolls the grounds
4-6pm Site-specific installations and Durational performances
6:30 Opening announcements
7-9pm Performances
9pm Projection Video work on Barn
10pm Food and Drink and Bonfire!

ESSENTIAL DEPARTURES:

How can female identifying performers disrupt the essentialized notion that we embody an element of nature? While we tend to think of our bodies as automatically politicized in an urban space, how to we take that energy and perspective into a rural space?

Using an experimental and collaborative pedagogy, Essential Departures will seek to challenge our own perspectives of making work in a rural environment, whilst building relationships with one another and the land itself.

We would like to invite you to participate in a week-long performance event we are curating in Upstate New York to present current radical feminist practice within a natural setting. The event will take place at the new venue Gray Zone for Performance Art at Rosekill Farm, Rosendale NY. All participating performance artists will spend the week living and working together at the location.

Artists will be responding to the site with consideration of the female body’s contextual relationship to nature as a point of departure. We would like to invite you to participate with a performance work on this theme. The week is also an opportunity to develop our practices through intensive exchange and dialogue within this stunning natural environment. The whole week will form an open performative space in which new solo and collaborative actions can evolve, in addition to the solo performances we will prepare, leading to the presentation of these and a group performance on the final evening.

In activating the inherent political potency of the female body, we will break apart woman’s historically fraught, imposed ‘bond’ with nature to present radical performance that uses the female body as an activist body within this natural context.

Rosekill Farm will provide a safe and challenging environment where radical practitioners can share in a process of exploration, and present substantial works on our communal core subject of using the female body as both source and medium.

BACKGROUND:

We are interested in a rural space being a grounds of investigation and the distinction between ruralality and nature. Female bodies, while not any more or less a part of nature than a male body, are often essentialized as being more of-the-earth and "natural". We are interested investigating - as a group 'beehiving' it - ideas of what it means to be in a female body, occupy space and identity, and present work we make in relation to these ideas.

ESSENTIALS:

We are able to offer artists on site accommodation (ranging from cozy to rustic based on individual needs), a nightly bonfire under the stars, food and drink for the course of the week, and a buzzing creative and inspiring atmosphere in which to focus solely on your practice on the 60 acres of lakes, fields, steams and forests on the performance specific wildness that is Rosekill. The eventwill run from July 20-26, 2015. We will be providing transport from New York City to Rosendale, a two-hour journey.
Please let us know if you have any queries about the above information and if you are interested in participating. We would be extremely excited to host you and your work as part of this event and hope that you would like to join us on what will be an unforgettable week.

Thank You,

Poppy, Tif and Jill

Poppy Jackson, Tif Robinette and Jill McDermid

How can female identifying performers disrupt the essentialized notion that we embody an element of nature?

We aren't just all hippy love and oneness and peace when in Naure but still radical and powerful and able to challenge the status quo as we don't live in isolation from it even in beautiful places . . . .

While we tend to think of our bodies as automatically politicized in an urban space, how to we take that energy and perspective into a rural space? Using an experimental and collaborative pedagogy, Essential Departures will seek to challenge our own perspectives of making work in a rural environment, whilst building relationships with one another and the land itself.

We would like to invite you to participate in a week-long performance event we arecurating in Upstate New York to present current radical feminist practice within a natural setting. The event will take place at the new venue Gray Zone for Performance Art at Rosekill Farm, Rosendale NY – a spectacular natural and wild environment. All participating performance artists will spend the week living and working together at the location.

Artists will be responding to the site with consideration of the female body’s contextual relationship to nature as a point of departure. We would like to invite you to participate with a performance work on this theme. The week is also an opportunity to develop our practices through intensive exchange and dialogue with the other invited artists within this stunning natural environment. The whole week will form an open performative space in which new solo and collaborative actions can evolve, in addition to our solo performances, leading to a group performance on the final evening.

In activating the inherent political potency of the female body, we will break apart woman’s historically fraught, imposed ‘bond’ with nature to present radical performance that uses the female body as an activist body within this natural context. Rosekill Farm will provide a safe and challenging environment where radical practitioners can share in a process of exploration, and present substantial works on our communal core subject of using the female body as both source and medium.

We are able to offer artists on site accommodation (ranging from cozy to rustic based on individual needs), a nightly bonfire under the stars, food and drink for the course of the week, and a buzzing creative and inspiring atmosphere in which to focus solely on your practice on the 60 acres of lakes, fields, steams and forests on the performance specific wildness that is Rosekill.

The eventwill run from July 20-26, 2015.

Please let us know if you have any queries about the above information and if you are interested in participating. We would be extremely excited to host you and your work as part of this event and hope that you would like to join us on what will be an unforgettable week.

Thank You,

Poppy, Tif and Jill

GRAY ZONE
1. An area intermediate between two mutually exclusive states or categories, where the border between the two is fuzzy.
2. It exists in a grey area between legal and illegal.
3. topic that is not clearly one thing or the other, that is open to interpretation.
4. Synonyms[ (an area intermediate between two mutually exclusive states or categories): penumbra
-wiktionary

The Gray Zone, Kingston and The Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn are run the by husband and wife team of Jill McDermid and Erik Hokanson

Presenting a Performance Art Gallery:
PERFORMANCE ART is not theater, dance, spoken-word, painting, poetry or sculpture yet it is all of these.

GRAY ZONE, KINGSTON continues the founding mission of the Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn: the Glorification of Performance Art, yet in a location more loudly resonant in Nature. Gray Zone on the Rondout is only yards away from the Hudson River estuary that provides life-sustaining water for agriculture and wildlife. Gray Zone is on Broadway, a life-sustaining thoroughfare through all of the variances of the City of Kingston, itself in a gray area surrounded by river, mountains, farms and towns.

GRAY ZONE celebrates the diversity of our world by centering itself in this city and in this valley that are abundant with all kinds of diversity - providing a conduit of experience for the peoples of Kingston, the Hudson Valley and beyond.

McDermid was first based in Marbletown, NY then Brooklyn where in 2006, with Melissa Lockwood, they opened the Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, offering live works by the current generation of performance artists from around New York, the USA and the world. These live performances have always been presented on the floor, not on a stage, dissolving the boundary between artist and viewer.

Grace Exhibition Space has had the opportunity to present local artists Thomas Albrecht [Kingston], Meghan Van Alstyne [Albany/Kinderhook]area artists Peter Dobill, Marni Kotak, Rob Andrews [NYC] Nyugen Smith, Rafael Sanchez [New Jersey] Marilyn Arsem , Mari Novotny-Jones, Jeff Huckleberry, Sandy Huckleberry, Alice Vogler, Vela Phelan, Sandrine Scheaffer, [Boston] and internationally renowned artists Roi Vaara, Essi Kasalinnen [Finland] Gim Gwang Cheol [South Korea] Boris Nieslony [Germany] W. Christiawan [Indonesia] Chen Jin [China] Fernando Ribiero [Brazil], Martin Renteria and Pancho Lopez [Mexico], Non Grata [Estonia + Beyond]

We plan to continue our focus on diverse community-building through our unique programming which will continue in Kingston, throughout the Hudson Valley and beyond.

Jill McDermid earned an MFA in Intermedia: Video + Performance after three intense years of study and creating at the University of Iowa, 2000. Since then, she has presented hundreds of performance art fdisolyas through the Grace Exhibition Space for Performance Art since 2006, the Fountain Art Fair, the Egeszegedre series and 21st Suffragettes: Art + Performance by Women.

Erik Hokanson studied at the Swain School of Design in New Bedford, MA. He worked as a painter, sculptor, jeweler and object-maker until 2007 when he began making conceptual performance art. Since then, he has been performing in NYC and international performance art festivals. He currently runs the Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn with Jill McDermid. Erik Hokanson is also a highly skilled luthier, making guitars from idea to design through building and playing.