Living Gallery: Jen Abrams

Tiny Hurricane

We love our children. They also destroy us. In Tiny Hurricane, a woman looks the charred wasteland of her pre-partum self dead in the eye, while standing in awe of the luminous, powerful child she has given herself over to. She tells the story of her own destruction through movement and text.

The transcendent joy of growing, birthing, and raising a new human is real. Tiny Hurricane deals with the price of that joy. My experience of becoming a parent was one of total destruction of the self I knew, of turning myself over completely to the experience of parenthood. Tiny Hurricane deals honestly with the loss of self many parents experience, but which is taboo to talk about in most parenting circles, and which is rarely portrayed in media. It is a moment of real talk about what a profound mess parenting actually is.

About Jen Abrams

Jen Abrams has been making body-based multi-disciplinary performance since 1994. She has been presented at Dixon Place, LaMama, BAX, HERE, and WOW Café Theater, where she was a member for twelve years. She is deeply informed by the work of Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver and by WOW’s reciprocal, community approach to developing and presenting performance; by Mary Overlie’s Viewpoints; and by 30 years of immersion in Contact Improvisation. In response to the 2009 financial crisis she co-founded OurGoods, a resource-sharing network helping artists do their work without money. She took a break from performance for four years to become a mother. Her performance practice was reanimated by the SITI Company’s Suzuki/Viewpoints training method, which permeates her current work.

Living Gallery, curated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa and normally produced in the Gibney Gallery, presents live performance of storytelling, monologues, spoken word, stand-up, or creative talks. Each performance – free and open to the public – runs 30-45 minutes, traditionally scheduled within the hour before a dance concert presented in Gibney’s Theater. Due to COVID-19, Living Galleries for the fall season will happen on Zoom.

All Winter & Spring 2021 Season events will be held online via Zoom. Gibney’s Box Office can be reached via email. For ticketing inquiries or requests, please email Marketing & Audience Services Manager, Kimiko Tanabe, at boxoffice@gibneydance.org.

Gibney encourages people with disabilities to attend online offerings, and we welcome the opportunity to make this event more accessible. If you have any questions or 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. If you are hoping to attend an event and would like us to engage the services of an ASL interpreter or audio descriptor, please let us know with as much notice as possible, and we’ll do our best to make it happen.

Photo by Vin Sharma.