EXWHYZEE

EXWHYZEE is a new dance choreographed/directed by ‘iconoclassical’ Sally Silvers to a poem by acclaimed experimental poet, Bruce Andrews. Performed by multiple award winning dancer Jeremy Nelson, the performance includes Bruce Andrews, reading his poem Vowels live & accompanied on the piano by the renowned composer/musician Michael Schumacher.

Silvers has improvised to Andrews’s texts/poems for decades as if they were music or as context for a choreographed dance, but this is the first time she has approached his writing head on. EXWHYZEE deals with literal meaning as direct source material as well as with the rhythm and sound of the words. The dance will correspond to literary, emotional meaning, sound, provided by words and music, and the ambiguity that a poem can provide — all to enhance each other.

Michael Schumacher will play live with an original composition connecting the poem and the dance and providing another layer of imagination to the mix.

The poem, Vowels, is from an earlier time in Bruce’s career, when he was questioning what it was like to be a man and have varied feelings, during the time his best friend in the poetry world was coming out as gay. It has a Gertrude Stein meets John Ashbery tone.

“Ask someone to explain the different varieties.

do the one which best fits the secret

or instead the the dream. there are several.

except these. the dreamer. if you aren’t

a stranger. rocking away, rotating, there

in the shape of an aorta”

Included in the program will be a “live choreography” where Silvers will complete a section of the dance live in front of the audience unrehearsed, a panel discussion and Q & A with the audience moderated by local artist, curator, imaginator Richard Colton, and a jam with all the performers including Silvers at the end.

The program will run close to an hour.

EXWHYZEE at The Flow Chart Foundation is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

(choreography/direction) is a Guggenheim Foundation and New York Dance and Performing Arts “Bessie” award-winning choreographer who has been making work since the 1980’s. She has articles, essays, and poems published in magazines, chapbooks, journals and anthologies. She choreographed 3 musicals for the Sundance Theater Festival, is the co-director of 2 award-winning dance films & her work is being archived and recorded by the New York City Performing Arts Library.

She has received multiple grants from the NEA, NY Foundation for the Arts & from NYSCA, NY Foundation for the Arts, The Jerome Foundation, & the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others. She is also known for several large dance community curatorial projects: TalkTalkWalkWalk (combining dance artists and poets) and Surprise Every Time (a festival of “live choreography’ – making work live in front of the audience on the spot). From 2005 to 2011 she danced in the new and historical works of Yvonne Rainer.

(poet) Poet, performance writer, poetics theorist, retired social scientist & Fordham Univ. Political Science professor (1975-2013), sound designer & long-time collaborator with Sally Silvers (on multi-media performance projects). Published: political science scholarship, 3 dozen books & chapbooks of poetry, plus recorded readings, anthology appearances, poetics essays, journal publications [check online]. Most recent: Upstage, combining Silvers's photography & my pandemic-era texts collage from signage in Asbury Park, NJ, published 2024 from Ugly Duckling Presse. Writing projects now: after finishing Zombies + Clones + Readymades / Writing Reading Vladirmir Sorokin, I'm working on HELL — a progressive/secular redoing of Dante's Inferno — to fit our moment.

(dancer) danced for the Siobhan Davies & Dancers and Second Stride Dance companies in London, and the Stephen Petronio Dance Company in New York as well as in works by David Zambrano, Luis A. Lara Malvacías, Susan Rethorst amongst others. He has taught classes and workshops in over 35 countries worldwide and has presented his own choreography in New York and internationally in Europe, South America and Asia. For the last 10 years he has been collaborating with Luis A. Lara Malvacías on an ongoing series of improvisational duets, performed in Amsterdam, Barcelona, New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin. He is a Full Arts Professor in NYU Tisch’s Dance Department and a recipient of a NY Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award and a 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship for choreography.

Photo credit: Stephen Gunther

Based in Brooklyn, (musician) has innovated in the area of spatialized sound and algorithmic composition since the 1980s, creating multi-channel, generative "Room Pieces" presented in galleries, museums, concert halls, public and private spaces. XI records has published a DVD set of five sound installations as computer applications. His installation at EMPAC ran 24/7 for one year. “Living Room Pieces” is a generative installation designed for home listening. “The Portable Multi-channel Sound System” is a complete immersive environment that fits in a suitcase, with which he has toured Europe and the United States. Schumacher’s compositions have been presented at GRM in Paris, Roulette, Issue Project Room, Artists Space, Ostrava Music Days, Transmediale, the MCA Lyon, The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Klangraum Krems, The Dream House, etc.His music has been published by Superpang, XI Records, Sub Rosa, Entr’acte, Quecksilber and Sedimental. Schumacher is the music director of the Liz Gerring Dance Company. He is an adjunct professor at NYU’s Steinhardt and Tandon schools and at Ramapo College in New Jersey.

(panel moderator) is a dancemaker/curator and writer living in Hudson, NY. He performed with Sally Silvers & Dancers at PS 122 in 1989 in a duet, Sports et Divertissements, with Harry Whittaker Sheppard, to music by Erik Satie.

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