DIGITAL: Talk it Out: Kayla Farrish/ Decent Structures Arts

Kayla Farrish, Yara Travieso, Marielis Garcia, moderated by Gilbert T Small II

Risk and Vision/New Radical Frontiers

Curator and panelist, Kayla Farrish will discuss with panelists Yara Travieso and Marielis Garcia, with moderator Gilbert T Small II. They will dive into the wildness, boldness, imagination, and heart it takes to create new ideas within interdisciplinary forms as BIPOC, minority, and women-identifying leaders and creatives. We will talk about disruptively questioning, breaking rules, expectations, support, creating the new blueprint, care, and the dare to radically imagine.

ABOUT KAYLA FARRISH

Kayla Farrish/Decent Structures Arts combines filmmaking, dance-theater, and sound score. Company commissions include Gibney (2020-2021), Louis Armstrong Museum (2020), Danspace (2019), Pepatian/BAAD! (2018), and beyond. Residencies include: Gallim (2021), Gibney, Baryshnikov Arts Center, AOS, NYU (2020), Keshet MSE, BAX, Petronio Residency Center (2019), Pepatian/BAAD! (2018), and Chez Bushwick (2017). Creations include Black Bodies Sonata, The New Frontier, With grit From, Grace, Spectacle, and Martyr’s Fiction(2021). In 2020-2021, she directed films and live performance hybrids: Inside the Laughing Barrel Collaboration (Armstrong Now!), Films Harbor, Falling Distance (Kizuna Dance/Alfred University Commission), The Poem, Biggie, and 3 Shepherds (Derrick Belcham), and co-directed Melanie Charles Y’ll Dnt Care Abt Blk Women. She made film Rinsing (Joe’s Pub/DanceNOW), co-choreographed with Brandon Coleman’a site-specific Broken Record (Little Island Festival), solo–NYLA Motherboard Suite, Roster, Music and Dance Collaboration with Melanie Charles for Four/Four, and directed Martyr’s Fiction Feature Film.

ABOUT YARA TRAVIESO

Yara Travieso is a Caribbean-American Brooklyn-based film/stage writer, director, filmmaker, choreographer, & educator drawing from a kaleidoscopic womanist-telenovela-realist lens. Travieso is a 2021 NYSCA grantee, a United States Artist Arison Fellow, a Creative Capital recipient, & a winner of the NALAC Grant via The Ford Foundation. Her live multimedia productions have been featured in NYC’s Park Avenue Armory, Lincoln Center, Performance Space NY, BRIC Arts Media, The Public Theater, The Knockdown Center, The High Line park, Opéra National de Lorraine France, New World Symphony Center, & EMPAC among others. Her film works have been presented with Film at Lincoln Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, PBS, Miami Film Festival, Cucalorus Film Festival, SXSW Panel Picker, Museum of The Moving Image, as well as commissioned by Google, Hermès of Paris, Glamour, GQ, & I Am An Immigrant among others. Travieso co-founded and ran the Borscht Film Festival from 2005-2010. She received a Dance BFA from The Juilliard School in 2009 & is currently on faculty at Juilliard leading a Film/New Media course. She has led talks and lectures with: The Ford Foundation, The Park Avenue Armory, MoMa, BAM, NYU, The New School, UnionDocs and Ghetto Film School, among others.

ABOUT MARIELIS GARCIA

Marielis Garcia is the Dance Artist in Residence within the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland. She is a Dominican American dance artist who has performed and toured with Brian Brooks (NY), Helen Simoneau (Winston-Salem, NC), and Peter Kyle Dance (NY), among others. She received her MFA in Digital and Interdisciplinary Art Practice from City College of New York. Marielis’ work has been presented both nationally and internationally. She was recently named Ballet Hispánico’s, Instituto Coreográfico Resident, and an Alvin Ailey, New Directions Choreography Lab recipient.

ABOUT GILBERT T SMALL II, MODERATOR

Gilbert T Small II is a dancer, choreographer, dramaturg, and rehearsal director. He started his formal training at the Baltimore School for the Arts and holds a BFA from SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Dance. Upon finishing his education, he was invited to join Ballet British Columbia as a collaborator and movement artist. Over the ten years, he worked with some of the leading choreographers of today. He has also worked with Sidra Bell, Zoe Scofield, and Kyle Abraham. Gilbert is currently the Curatorial Director of Training and Rehearsal Director of the Gibney Company.

Talk It Out!, Gibney’s lively digital talk show, features celebrated moderators and curated guests from the best of the arts.

Gibney encourages people with disabilities to attend online offerings, and we welcome the opportunity to make this event more accessible. This event features live ASL interpreters and live captioning. If you have any questions or additional access needs, please email us at constanza@gibneydance.org or call us at 212-677-8560 (voice only) at least 24 hours in advance of the event you plan to attend.

Image Description: Collage of four photos. Descriptions from top to bottom, left to right: Kayla sits up against the bed on the floor in a large floral bedroom. She holds a notebook and pen in her hand, and dares to look with feeling, accountability, and fight towards the camera as she writes and dreams radically. Dark brown skin man with short black hair, touching his face with his right hand. His hand a ring on his 4th finger. Looking straight at the lens, half of Marielis’ face is covered by one hand pointing upward, the other hand is pulled out by her elbow. Yara Travieso.

From top to bottom, left to right: Photo of Kayla Farrish by Kayla Farrish. Photo of Gilbert T Small II by Marcus Eriksson. Photo of Marielis Garcia by Whitney Brown. Photo of Yara Travieso by Katia Repina.