PREMIERE, the new work by choreographer Maria Hassabi brings, together a team of five performers, including Biba Bell, Hristoula Harakas, Robert Steijn, Andros Zins-Browne, and Hassabi. Over the past ten years, Maria Hassabi has developed a practice involved with the relation of the body to the image defined by the sculptural physicality and extended duration inherent in her choreography. Extending from her past works, PREMIERE underscores movement in a space shared with others, while highlighting the figurative role of the performer as body and object. The title, PREMIERE - equally suggestive of expectation and reveal - amplifies the conditions of the work’s reception. How to value a premiere without expectation? It is a highly anticipated event, representing the first meeting with the public: the audience, as viewer and critic. PREMIERE explores the transformative appeal of this over-emphasized moment that validates the existence of any creation as a 'work of art'. Comprised of five solos occurring simultaneously onstage, the work unravels through impossibly slow movement with attention fixed on the intricacies of every shape, shift and negotiation of space. Through the shared state of being in motion together - the connectivities in space and gesture, exhibited and endured - each performer is implicated by the other’s presence, yet defined by their singularity. For this occasion at Live Arts Week PREMIERE departs from the black box theater and inhabits the gallery at MAMbo.

"Isn’t it true that time struggles with the plasticity of our body? Movement struggles. Change struggles. Dancing bodies struggle. Bodies that breathe and move in time experiences walls as resistance. Dance experiences the floor as resistance. But, space does not abolish time and change is not abolished. It is incorporated directly by the dance as a form of the ephemeral, and it is performed as an experience between the bodies for an audience. It is premiering. Time and movement are the interior of this spacing; its content, just as blood and the breath are ‘inside’ the bodies. Thus, it is internalized. It affects each dancer differently, at the level of their metabolism, their feeling, and their personality. And it is because this ‘new difference’, this new rate of change, occurs in each and every performance that this ephemeral element always appears as if for the first time. It always PREMIERES, though it will never exist again, and will never in fact be seen in just the same way by anyone else".     (Scott Lyall, dramaturg's note, october 2013)

by Maria Hassabi
performers Biba Bell, Hristoula Harakas, Robert Steijn, Andros Zins-Browne, and Hassabi
dramaturg Scott Lyall
styling threeASFOUR
sound design Alex Waterman
lighting design Zack Tinkelman and Maria Hassabi
production assistants Meghan Finn and Kate Ryan
co-production The Kitchen and Performa 13 (NY), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Kaaitheater (Brussels), steirischer herbst (Graz), Dance4 (Nottingham)
with the support of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Program
additional funding MAP Fund, Jerome Foundation, LMCC Manhattan Community Arts Fund, Mertz Gilmore Foundation’s Late-Stage Production Stipends
production residencies Kaaitheater (Brussels), Pa-f (St Erme), Mount Tremper (NY)