New York Butoh Institute
presents
A Free Virtual Butoh Festival Series
Screenshot by Scott Rubin
October 21 to October 31, 2021:
Cristal Sabbagh
(in collaboration with
Olivia Harris and Scott Rubin)
Sowing Asynchronicities
Available at
www.vimeo.com/vangeline
FREE
Olivia Harris and Cristal Sabbagh–screenshot by Scott Rubin
Sowing Asynchronicities was commissioned by New York Butoh Institute for the Women Defining Butoh Festival.
Sowing Asychronicities initially began with creating automatic drawings alongside sound and movement. Each drawing began with regeneration, and they formed the structure, material, and scenery. This project treats time and space as non-linear, moving freely between the present and various pasts. This fluidity creates a web of reflections where the performers find connections with their bodies, the instrument, and sound.
Cristal Sabbagh’s interdisciplinary practice includes traditional portraiture, ceramics, and performance. While movement is the spine of her practice and the core that all her other work emanates from, intentional spontaneity, reverence, and bliss are threads woven throughout. Sabbagh’s performance practice, rooted in improvisation and butoh, walks a line between the everyday, the divine, the personal, and the political. In embodying in her art transformational memories while simultaneously celebrating pop culture and the experimental, she challenges power structures and awakens viewers’ senses. Working both in a solo capacity and with collaborators, Sabbagh is equally attuned to individual perspectives and collective structures.
Olivia Harris: A child of Cleveland, OH, and a descendant on of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and the American South, experimental sound artist and activist, Oli via Harris is a cellist, improviser, composer, and visual artist whose work is rooted in their Black American and Latinx heritage, Afrofuturism, and queerness. With a deep commitment to social justice, Oli creates and interprets works that embody principles of radical honesty, self-love, and equity. They are enthusiastic about collaborating across genres and mediums and have played alongside dancers, visual artists, actors, and singer-songwriters, including regular collaborations with their brother, writer Bernard E. P. Harris.
Scott Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist and improvising violist whose work interrogates relationships between sound and movement through analog and digital means. His recent projects have involved collaborations with musicians, dancers, and visual artists, often incorporating interactive acoustic/electronic improvisation, expanded performance practices, motion-sensors, and video. In these projects, he engages themes of intimacy, control, and the sublime.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.