@CPR | Smashworks Dance: CITY STORIES
NOVEMBER 18 @ 7:30PM
NOVEMBER 19 @ 5PM & 7:30PM
Smashworks Dance is pleased to announce its evening-length performance CITY STORIES, live at Center for Performance Research in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, November 18-19, 2022. CITY STORIES is a multimedia performance inspired by the verve, challenges, and elation of living in New York City. This interdisciplinary collaboration brings together choreography and immersive video projections by Ashley McQueen, and paintings on Metropolitan Transit Authority subway maps by Benny Cruz.
An episodic pastiche of emotional peaks and valleys, CITY STORIES teeters between sublimity and deluge, showing the unheroic heroism of surviving in New York City’s ecosystem.
Drawing together choreography, video installation, painting, and audience participation, CITY STORIES is a malleable and deeply personal expression of everyday life in an unpredictable mirage. Choreography is sourced from the dancers’ reflections and personal narratives and improvisations based on written audience submissions throughout the performance. Upon entry, attendees receive a miniature subway map and are encouraged to share their own words for integration into the live performance. CITY STORIES honors a multiplicity of experiences with narratives that overlap and diverge: a joyride no matter whose strand you follow.
With wall-to-wall-to-wall video installation, CITY STORIES is a surreal, gritty, sarcastic, self-aware, and poetic performance experience.