Assistant Professor of the Practice Danielle Russo is pleased to share news of her performance installation, SINCE THOU WAST PRECIOUS IN MY SIGHT, VOL. 3, taking place Friday, November 1 from 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM in the Sage Chapel Crypt, free and open to the public as part of Ithaca Gallery Night.
Vol. 3 features a cast of world-class dance artists—Alexander Anderson (Nederlands Dans Theater), Kayla Farrish (Kyle Abraham/AIM), Jaruam Xavier (Balé da Cidade de São Paulo), and Kevin Shannon (Hubbard Street Dance Chicago)—in a series of highly athletic duels on persistent 30-minute loops, confronting habits, grievances, and at times, desires to submit. When cycles of will and reckoning transcend into the ritualized, what is the endurance, the ceiling, the undoing of a body of trust and conviction?
Choreographer Danielle Russo draws upon themes of original sin, obedience, and penance from her own experiences with/standing Catholic devotions to expose and dually exhaust socialized and conditioned frameworks of performative power via pious postures, gestures, ritual motifs, iconographies, and taboos. Each artist engages with an opposing performer for two consecutive cycles, urging bystanders to confront their own biases around cyclical patterns of control, force, deference, or the resistance thereof. What of their own biases and complicities will be revealed? To which will they hold themselves accountable? Confess? Reconcile?
Intentionally pared down in its staging, the installation is equally witnessed by the incidental soundscape of its heard devotion.
Sage Chapel emerged in retaliation to whispers of the school’s “godlessness,” but as the first nonsectarian chapel to serve a university campus in the country. Patron Henry W. Sage stipulated that "students should be attracted but not coerced into it." In 1872, Reverend and first Professor of Architecture Charles Babcock presented its design. Its active service still stands beside secular artwork commemorating the academic subjects [lending to the nickname “heathens on the hill”] as well as its memorial to Civil Rights workers echoed by its legacy of historic gatherings and speeches by iconic change makers, such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. It is also the resting place of fourteen individuals, including Ezra Cornell.
Doors will open promptly at 5:00 PM and audiences will have agency to move about the space and exit at-will. For the complete program and project description, please visit www.drpp.nyc/st-ithaca.
Trigger Warning: Please note that the performances explore mature content with an intense, vulnerable physicality.
Previous volumes have been presented at Julian Schnabel's Casa del Popolo, Armory Arts Week, National Academy for Performing Arts (POS), and Co-Prosperity Gallery with The School of the Art Insitute of Chicago. This premiere of Vol. 3 is made possible by funding in part with the Cornell Council for the Arts, Cornell Society for the Humanities Research Grants with the Office of the Vice President of Research & Innovation, Arthur C. & Molly Phelps Bean Faculty Fellowship, and SOS Grant Funding from the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County, with the generosity and support the Department of Performing & Media Arts and the Office of Spirituality and Meaning Making at Cornell University.
While these outstanding collaborators are working in-residence at Cornell, Russo has also curated a weeklong, open dance series that all students, faculties, and community members are welcome to attend.
Contemporary with Alexander Anderson on Monday 10/28, 4:50pm - 6:30pm, Stu 320
Choreography for Site-Specific to Immersive Dance Theatre with Kayla Farrish on Tuesday 10/29, 3:30pm - 4:30pm, Stu 320
Ballet with Kevin Shannon on Tuesday 10/29, 6:30pm - 8pm, SB10 [with Cornell Ballet Club]
Brazilian Fusion with Jaruam Xavier on Wednesday 10/30, 4:50pm - 5:50pm, Stu 320
