River to River 2022
In 2022, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels is supporting the Festival River To River 2022 for the presentation of 5 performances.
Presented by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), the River To River Festival is Downtown New York City’s completely free summer arts festival. The River To River Festival celebrates artistic and creative diversity across disciplines, presenting live art and installation in public spaces and in partnership with leading institutions in Lower Manhattan.
Okwui Okpokwasili et Peter Born
Repose without rest without end
Exhibition
12-26 June
Fosun Concourse Amphitheater
Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born’s new video and sound installation takes its point of departure from Okpokwasili’s performance work Adaku’s Revolt. This new piece focuses on a young Black girl who, as she is coming of age, rejects imposed beauty standards. She stops straightening her hair in refusal of the pain and damage created by chemical straighteners and hot irons used to tame unruly curls.
In this new video installation, Okpokwasili draws connections between Adaku’s hair and tree roots. The girl’s refusal becomes a vehicle of resistance from which the artist draws connections with trees whose seeds were transported by fugitive slaves in their hair. These acts of resistance reproduced networks not unlike the way trees communicate through extensive root systems underground. Stories and seeds are passed on through multiple generations of humans and vegetation, refusing trauma while reproducing and celebrating resilience.
Jonathan González
PRACTICE
Performance
17 June
The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center
In PRACTICE, Afro-Diasporic cultural idioms are interwoven through dance, sound, speech acts and design to incite the critical through-lines of creolized expressive arts formed within the greater Caribbean and Turtle Island. Performed in the historic open-air setting of La Plaza at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center, this one-night engagement invites audience members into the performative practice as party-goers, celebrating the gift of gathering in person and holding space for the long emancipatory uses of culture by African-descendants in the supposed “New World” for radical place-making and liberation.
Beth Gill
Nail biter
Performance
22-23 June
Beth Gill’s Nail Biter is a darkly beautiful dreamscape in which the theatrical tools of character and story are reimagined through a psychodramatic lens, transforming contemporary dance performance into a vital space of ritual. Nail Biter reaches towards science fiction and ancient myth to reveal stories of connection and loss with a sense of magic and awe.
Keyon Gaskin
Performance
Performance
23-25 June
The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center
Heather Kravas
duet / duet
Performance
25-26 June
Governors Island
duet/duet is a dance that takes place in a field in the sunshine next to another dance that occurs inside a room, overlooking a river at sunset. It is a dance created between performers opal ingle, Joey Kipp and Jennifer Kjos, in partnership with choreographer Heather Kravas. One dance contemplates a shape formed between two people so that we might also consider the distance between them. The other reflects a line as two people travel and change together. With no adherence to expectations, the performance is a vessel to experience the specific temporality of dusk.
About the partner
Festival River To River
In 2024, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels is supporting the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for the presentation of the 23rd annual River To River Festival.
