"Two Person Operating System Type 2" Premieres in NYC!
February 3 & 4, 2024 | The Kitchen, New York, NY
A collaboration between choreographer Susan Marshall and artist Martha Friedman
With collaborating dancers Ching-I Chang, Miriam Gabriel, Paul Hamilton and Luke Miller (Assistant Choreographer)
Sound Design: Dan Trueman
Two sunset-tinged, sold-out performances generated a lovely and palpable feeling of community, with friends old and new in attendance. Sarah Cecilia Bukowski wrote in the Dance Enthusiast:
Two Person Operating System Type 2 is, in a word, curious. Curious in its articulate yet cryptic exchanges between bodies and objects, curious in the spareness and complexity of its presentation, and curious in the exploratory sense—each artist seems deeply interested in the vocabulary, materials, and expressive potential of the other’s medium.
Two Person Operating System Type 2 continues a performance-installation series examining the intimate relationships between people and objects. We seek to engage viewers to think about the sensory experience of inhabiting a body, and touching or navigating inanimate and animate bodies outside their own. Working with industrial objects and materials such as rubber and metal, dancers activate sculptures in complex patterns, probing preconceptions of physical boundaries.
In this iteration, two towers of metal tubes are each capable of supporting metal spikes and rotating in place. Long, fleshy rubber ropes are inserted, spooled and twisted through the sculpture by dancers engaging with the objects and each other in a series of methodical tasks performed with workerly precision. The evolving patterns of action and design explore the tensions between work and product, danger and intimacy, absurdity and purpose, soft and hard, in and out. This serves to complicate expectations of clear, binary contrasts often raised in gendered conversations about physical bodies.
Two Person Operating System Type 2 premiered to limited Covid-restricted audiences in June 2021; this was its NYC premiere. The first iteration of this project, Two Person Operating System (2016), premiered at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, was shown in galleries in NYC, San Francisco, and a found warehouse in Brooklyn, and was written up in Artforum and the New Yorker, among others. Subsequent iterations of this evolving series of works will be performed at varied venues across the country.
Presented as part of The Kitchen’s Winter 2024 Season. This presentation of Two Person Operating System Type 2 was also made possible by a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and funding from generous individuals.
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