Onassis presents ENTER HOW ARE WE | Emily Mast and Yehuda Duenyas

Photo: Saskia Clerckx

HOW ARE WE

Barnett Cohen

Barnett Cohen originally received formal theatrical training, with an emphasis on breath and vocal work, at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. He then embarked on a career as a visual artist, making performances and paintings that collectively serve as meditations on the space between thought and self, and between self and the body. He has exhibited work and presented performances at numerous venues including REDCAT, JOAN, LAXART, Pieter, Neutra VDL House, Mast on Fig, 365 Mission, Human Resources (all in Los Angeles), JDJ (New York), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), City Limits (Oakland). In 2021, he will present a new suite of paintings at JDJ. Cohen received a BA in English from Vassar College in 2005, and an MFA from CalArts in 2014; he attended Skowhegan in 2013, MacDowell in 2019, and was nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant in 2020.

Constance Hockaday

Constance Hockaday is a queer Chilean-American from the US/Mexico Border. She is a director and visual artist who creates immersive social sculptures on urban waterways that confront issues surrounding public space, political voice, and belonging. In 2001, she began making work with the Floating Neutrinos, a family of psycho-spiritual wanderers who sailed around the world in handmade vessels. She has collaborated with Swoon’s “Swimming Cities” projects, sailing floating sculptures along the Hudson, Mississippi, and the Adriatic Sea (2006-09). In 2011, she created the Boatel, a floating art hotel in NYC’s Far Rockaways made of refurbished salvaged boats – an effort to reconnect New Yorkers to their waterfront. The project attracted 5000+ visitors, international press and critical acclaim. “The New York Times” described her 2014 piece “All These Darlings and Now Us” as a “powerful commentary on the forces of technification and gentrification roiling San Francisco.” Hockaday holds an MFA in Social Practice and MA in Conflict Resolution. Her work has been supported by Map Fund, YBCA, Mills College Art Museum, Parrish Art Museum, The Untitled Art Fair, and Flux Factory. She is a Senior TED Fellow and an artist in residence at UCLA Center for the Art of Performance.

Faye Driscoll

Born in Venice Beach, California, Faye Driscoll is a NYC-based Bessie Award-winning performance maker who has been hailed as a “startlingly original talent” (Roslyn Sulcas, “The New York Times”) and “a postmillenium postmodern wild woman” (Deborah Jowitt, “The Village Voice”). Her work has been presented nationally at Wexner Center for the Arts, Walker Art Center, Institute for Contemporary Art/Boston, MCA Chicago and BAM/Brooklyn Academy of Music, and internationally at La Biennale di Venezia, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, Melbourne Festival, Belfast International Arts Festival, Onassis Stegi in Athens and Centro de Arte Experimental in Buenos Aires. Her most recent performance, “Space,” was the final live work in her “Thank You for Coming” trilogy. “Space” is a moving requiem on art, the body, loss and human connectivity, and was celebrated as “an exhilaratingly personal culmination of the series” (Miram Felton-Dansky, “Artforum”). Her first-ever solo museum exhibition, “Come On In,” opened at Walker Art Center in February offering gallery-goers an experience of six distinct audio-guided experiences called “Guided Choreographies for the Living and The Dead.” Following Covid-19 related closures, an online adaptation has been made available at walkerart.org. When she isn’t making performance worlds of sensorial complexity in which viewers feel their own culpability as co-creators, she is choreographing for plays and films, including the Broadway production of Young Jean Lee’s “Straight White Men,” and Josephine Decker’s award-winning feature film “Madeline’s Madeline.” She is a Guggenheim Fellow and a winner of the Jacob’s Pillow Artist Award.

Darrian O'Reilly

Darrian O'Reilly is an LA-based choreographer whose work is in dialogue with dance, clown, and improvisational theatre. She has presented in venues across Los Angeles, including Electric Lodge, HomeLA, REDCAT, Highways Performance Space, The Fowler Museum, Beyond Baroque, and El Camino College, among others. Darrian currently serves as a lecturer at East Los Angeles College, and as a movement instructor for The Idiot Workshop. She received her BA from the Gallatin School at NYU, and MFA in Dance at the World Arts and Cultures/Dance Department at UCLA.

David Adrian Freeland Jr.

David Adrian Freeland Jr. received his early dance training at Jacksonville Centre of the Arts and is a graduate from Douglas Anderson School of the Arts, in Jacksonville, Florida. He furthered his dance studies at several prestigious intensive programs affiliated with The Juilliard School, Nashville Ballet, Atlanta Festival Ballet, and the Bates Dance Festival. David attended the Conservatory of Dance at SUNY Purchase College and began working toward his BFA in Dance before being invited to join Ailey II, the second company of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, where he danced for three years. During this time, he performed seminal works by Alvin Ailey, Judith Jamison, Robert Battle, as well as new works by Troy Powell, Dwight Rhoden, Jennifer Archibald, Amy Hall-Garner, Malcolm Low, and Donald Byrd, among others. David’s professional experience also includes seasons performing with The Metropolitan Opera and Missouri Ballet Theatre. In 2016, David joined L.A. Dance Project where he has both created roles and danced in important stage and film works by Benjamin Millepied, Kyle Abraham, Justin Peck, Ohad Naharin, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Roy Assaf, Noé Soulier, and Shannon Gillen. David is the proud recipient of a 2018 Princess Grace Award in Dance.

Dorothy Dubrule

Dorothy Dubrule is a choreographer and performer based in Los Angeles. Her choreography is often made in collaboration with people who do not identify as dancers, and has been performed in theaters as well as bars, clubs, galleries, sound stages, and sports arenas. She has performed in the work of artists, choreographers, and directors such as alexx shilling, Alison D'Amato, Lea Anderson, Melinda Ring, Milka Djordjevich, Narcissister, Tino Sehgal, and Zoe Aja Moore. Dorothy received an MFA from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and has been the director of Pieter Performance Space since 2017. Prior to moving to LA, she danced with DIY performance collective Club Lyfestile and comedy fly-girl crew Body Dreamz in Philadelphia. A board member of Grex, the West Coast Affiliate of the AK Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems, Dorothy organizes workshops and writes about issues of social identity and power as they arise in art contexts. Following the publication of her essay, "What I'm Doing When I'm Selling Out," on SF MoMA's Open Space, she is currently working with 53rd State Press to edit a collection of writing by performers who have been contracted by visual arts institutions to work in live exhibitions.

Emily Mast

Emily Mast's work pulls from a combination of practices – visual art, theater and dance – and is anchored in the production of multi-compositional projects that employ live performance, sculptural installation and video. With every project Mast gathers a micro-community of collaborators with whom she engages in the collective exploration of a given work’s subject matter. Mast believes she has something to learn from everyone. She has staged “choreographed exhibitions” and presented live performances at: Picasso Museum, Barcelona, Spain (2019); Théâtre des Champs Élysées, Paris (2019); Los Angeles Dance Project (2019); The LUMA Foundation, Arles, France (2018 & 2019); Human Resources, Los Angeles (2018); FRAC Occitanie Montpellier, France (2017); Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, Austria (2017); The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2017); the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2016); La Ferme du Buisson, Noisiel (2015); China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles (2015); Mona Bismarck American Center, Paris (2015); Silencio, Paris (2015); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014); The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014); Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2014); Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Project Space, New York (2013); Simone Subal Gallery, New York (2013); the Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paolo, Brazil (2013); Public Fiction, Los Angeles (2012); REDCAT, Los Angeles (2012 & 2016) and Performa, New York (2009). In 2018 Emily opened a non-profit space in Los Angeles called Mast on Fig that is dedicated to the development and communal sharing of experiential, live events. It is currently closed to the public due to Covid-19.

Yehuda Duenyas

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Yehuda Duenyas is an experiential artist and director working in a spectrum of mediums from performance to commercial directing. Yehuda creates immersive encounters and interactive environments that sensuously evoke the mythic, the intimate, the ridiculous, and the sublime. His techniques emerge from his passion and experience working in the arenas of immersive theater, intimacy direction, interactive technologies, ride design, reality television, large-scale events, gaming, and physical computing. His work and collaborations have received a Primetime Emmy award, 2 Webby awards, 8 Cannes Lions, 11 Clios, 2 Facebook awards, and an OBIE award, among others. Yehuda received an MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and was a founding member of the award winning New York theater collaborative the National Theater of the United States of America (NTUSA). In addition, his work has been supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, the Greenwall Foundation, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the 9/11 Fund, the Downtown Theater Alliance, the Jerome Foundation, Arts International, Chashama, the Durst Organization, Two-Trees Realty, as well as private funders. Yehuda is also an Intimacy Coordinator for TV, Film, and Theater. He is currently collaborating on a new venture to specifically train Los Angeles-based BIPOC to become Intimacy Coordinators.

Hana van der Kolk

Hana van der Kolk is a dancer, artist, educator, counselor, writer, experimental media maker, and facilitator of community events and spaces formerly based in Los Angeles and currently making home, growing food, and learning place in Troy, NY. In their varied roles and projects Hana proposes more interconnected and livable futures through a commitment to moves of multi-directional intimacy and enchantment. They have performed and taught internationally, collaborated with Tomislav Feller, Asher Woodworth, Senem Pirler, Kamryn Wolf, Angela Beallor, Lailye Weidman, Emily Mast, and so many others, work with the community bike shop Troy Bike Rescue, are the gatherer of the temporary “church” A Patch of Sky, hold an MFA from UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures/Dance Department, and are currently pursuing a practice-based PhD in Art at RPI in Troy.

Photo: Saskia Clerckx

Heyward Bracey

Heyward Bracey – butoh dancer / movement activist – has worked and performed with a number of outstanding experimental dance collectives including Los Angeles Movement Arts and The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People – a North America based project addressing the histories and social realities surrounding black and queer bodies. He has collaborated with master butoh artist Katsura Kan in Los Angeles, New York, and at the Seattle International Dance Festival. His solo, “Stealing Skin 6,” was presented at the Bare Bones Butoh Showcase in San Francisco, Pieter Performance Space in Los Angeles, and the Convocatoria Dance Symposium in Mexico City. Heyward's interest in the body as a social/political/spiritual process has led to collaborations with Emily Mast in “The Least Important Things,” presented in 2014 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and “The Cage is a Stage,” presented in 2016 at University of Toronto Mississauga, the Harbourfront Centre Theater (Toronto), and the REDCAT in Los Angeles. In 2018 Heyward presented “Thick Bones,” a solo work exploring the relationship between butoh and the African Diaspora at the Kyoto International Butoh Festival. For the Hammer Museum’s 2018 “Made in LA Exhibition” he collaborated with choreographer Taisha Paggett and the WXPT Dance Collective on a series of social justice-oriented dance actions. Heyward's work explores the effects of colonialism upon diverse populations – as well as the intersections of butoh, indigenous cosmologies, the African Diaspora, the Pacific Basin Renaissance and street dance.

Jay Carlon

Named Dance Magazine’s Top ‘25 to Watch’ in 2020, Jay Carlon is a contemporary choreographer based in Los Angeles whose highly physical work is focused in experimental, site-sensitive dance theater. Born and raised on California’s Central Coast, Carlon’s work is inspired by his background as a competitive wrestler while growing up the youngest of 12 in a Filipino, Catholic, and agricultural migrant-working family. In 2016, he started a multidisciplinary dance group called CARLON. Jay’s work has been presented in Los Angeles at REDCAT, The Broad Museum, Los Angeles Dance Project, Annenberg Community Beach House, LA Dance Festival, Electric Lodge, Los Angeles Performance Practice, homeLA, and Beach Dances; in New York at 92ndY and The CURRENT SESSIONS; in Phoenix at Breaking Ground Festival; in Monterrey, Mexico at Espacio Expectante; and in Bangkok, Thailand at Creative Migration. Jay is a performer and directing associate with aerial spectacle theater company Australia’s Sway Pole, where he has performed at the 2014 Olympics, the 2016 World EXPO, and the 2018 Super Bowl. Carlon has also performed with the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center, Palissimo, Oguri, No)One. ArtHouse, and danced for Rodrigo y Gabriela on Jimmy Kimmel Live (choreographed by Annie-B Parson), in Solange’s art film “Metatronia” (2018) choreographed by Gerard & Kelly, and was appointed Choreographic Associate for Kanye West's opera, “Mary” (2019).

Jessica Emmanuel

Jessica Emmanuel is a Los Angeles-based dancer, choreographer, performance artist, educator and curator. She studied Dance & Choreography at the BOCES Cultural Arts Center in New York and is a graduate of The California Institute of the Arts with a BFA in Performance & Choreography. Jessica is the founder of HumanStages and a co-founder of the theater-based artist collective Poor Dog Group. Her work has been presented internationally at the Bootleg Theater, Live Arts Exchange Festival, the New Original Works Festival at REDCAT, Montserrat DTLA, Highways Performance Space, Zoukak Studios (Lebanon), The Getty Villa, Interferences Festival (Romania), Baruch Performing Arts Center, The Curtis R. Preim Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), and The Contemporary Art Museum Santa Barbara. She has choreographed/performed for Poor Dog Group, Heidi Duckler Dance Theater, The MOVEMENT Movement, Ania Catherine, Genevieve Carson, Bryan Reynolds, Paul Outlaw, No)One. ArtHouse, and Stacy Dawson Stearns. Jessica has also curated art events at various locations in Los Angeles.

Jennie MaryTai Liu

Jennie MaryTai Liu is an artist engaged with bodies across disciplines of choreography, video, and writing. Her work has been commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Human Resources LA, The Mistake Room, Bushwick Starr, Live Arts Exchange, the former Dance Theater Workshop, Prelude Festival, HERE Arts Center, and Incubator Arts Center. She is currently organizing an exhibition produced by Pieter funded in part by the Mike Kelley Foundation which engages artists from a range of disciplines to respond to the history of early modern dance in Los Angeles. She has been a resident artist at Headlands Center for the Arts, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Bogliasco Foundation, Yaddo Arts Colony, EMPAC, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, MAP Fund, Jerome Foundation, and Center for Cultural Innovation. She co-founded and edited riting.org, an experiment in writing that engages with performance being made now in LA. She also regularly collaborates as a performer with Big Dance Theater, Adam Linder, and Poor Dog Group. She holds a BFA in Theater, Experimental Theater Wing, from NYU, and an MFA in Dance from Hollins University.

Mireya Lucio

Mireya Lucio is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, performer, and educator from Puerto Rico based in Los Angeles. A trained actor, singer, and physical performer (BFA Tisch/NYU; Moscow Art Theatre; MFA CalArts), she allows amateur and do-it-yourself aesthetics to disturb established modes of theatrical performance, creating space for the transformation of embodied research into ritual acts of decolonization. Her work has taken the form of dinners, lectures, walking tours, videos, stage shows, and game nights. Recent solo works include “Brandenburg Gate: The American Hits” (PAM), and “¡Con la boca es un mamey!” (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). Her collaborative practice with Sallie Merkel, Emotional Labor Co., weaves popular culture and academic inquiry into non-linear, transgressive studies of female experience: “Our-So-Called Sleepover, or, Freud and Jung Crash 1995 Through a Ouija Board” (LAX Festival), “The Commons” (digital series), and the iterative Witches’ Cabaret (“We Put a Spell on You!” at Machine Project's Mystery Theater; “Witch House” at CalArts; “Love Spells” at Mast on Fig; and “Casting into the Unknown,” presented via livestream).

Shannon Hafez

Shannon Hafez is an artist based in Los Angeles exploring dance and movement in relationship to other art forms and mediums. They have appeared in Solange’s “Metatronia,” performed at venues such as Hauser & Wirth and Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA), and have been a part of various music videos, films, and performances. Shannon is currently studying dance at California Institute of the Arts.

Stacy Dawson Stearns

Stacy Dawson Stearns is an artist working in performance, film, and new media. Her work has been presented at PS122, MassMOCA, St. Ann’s Warehouse, The Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Jacob’s Pillow, Geffen Playhouse, and REDCAT, among others. She has worked with companies and collectives such as Blacklips Performance Cult, Psych-Out DaDa GoGo Family, Big Dance Theater (dir. Annie-B Parson), Advanced Beginner Group (dir. David Neumann), NTUSA, Channel B4, The Vampire Cowboys, and Grand Lady Dance House. In the world of popmegabiz, she has choreographed for Debbie Harry and Ann Magnusen. In film, she has worked with directors Hal Hartley and Jonathan Demme.

Terrence Luke Johnson

He has been improvising since 1968. At first, he was in theatrical improv companies and then since the late nineties I have been working mostly in the dance world. He has collaborated with Simone Forti, Rudy Pérez, Shel Wagner Rausch, Carmela Hermann, Dana Hirsch, and Emily Mast among others, as well as the editor of this piece Sarah Swenson, choreographer, dancer, teacher and his very good friend.