nia love Research Showing: g1(host), a new iteration, UnderCurrents
nia love Research Showing: g1(host), a new iteration, UnderCurrents
Saturday | April 3 | 7:30 p.m.
UnderCurrents Virtual Screening
Free and open to the Bi-Co Community and the public.
UnderCurrents Community Screening*
Goodhart Hall
Free and open to the Bi-Co Community.
Choreographer nia love
Performance nia love, Lela Aisha Jones, Makeda Roney
Filmmaker Aidan Un
The Performing Arts Series presents simultaneous virtual and community screenings of "UnderCurrents," the culmination of performance research choreographer nia love conducted this year in residency at Bryn Mawr College. love explored embodied memory, Blackness, and healing through the lens of her work "g1(host)" in two two-week residencies in November and March. This screening will comprise two short films by Aidan Un, the first, a short documentary of love’s time at Bryn Mawr College in residence and in community with students, and the second, a piece documenting "UnderCurrents," the newest iteration of love’s multi-year performance research "g1(host):lost at sea." This work features performances by Lela Aisha Jones, Makeda Roney, and nia love.
"The center of gravity in my work is the question of blackness and the complexity held within the experiences it names: resistance, virtuosity, breaking, hypermobility, inordinate constraint. I aim to destabilize and dismantle ‘dance,’ redressing it as gesture–the memory of movement and geographies held in the body. My work gets made under the viewer’s gaze: interfaces between the audience, my flesh, and the object-sonic environment, produces experimental flows of real-time visceral response and improvisatory action. I craft for the stage and beyond: galleries, gardens, farms, and most recently, the ocean floor." —nia love
*Bi-Co Community Members Only: The Performing Arts Series invites you to experience this screening in community, in a masked, socially-distant, limited-capacity gathering, following the College's COVID-19 safety guidelines.
About nia love
Presently, love lives on unceded Lenape Nation land known as New York. In honor of her maternal grandmothers and their historical participation in black feminism and the powers of domesticity that radically move away from patriarchy, love wanted her pen name to be spelled in lowercase to shift the attention from her identity to her ideas.
Her career spans 40 years, beginning in 1978 as one of the youngest international apprentices with Ballet Nacional de Cuba. love received a B.F.A. in theater directing and pre-medicine from Howard University and an M.F.A. in choreography from Florida State University. In 1996, love studied Butoh and toured with Japanese Butoh master Min Tanaka. She was named an honorary Fulbright Fellow in 2002-03.
love has two Bessie Awards: a 2017 Outstanding Performance award for "Skeleton Architecture" and a 2020 Outstanding Music Composition/Sound Design award for "g1(host)." love is a recipient of the 2019 Gibney Presents Residency and Gibney Dance in Process, Urban Bush Women’s 2019-2021 Choreographic Center Initiative Fellowship (extended award due to COVID-19 pandemic), the 2020 MAP Fund Grant, a 2020-21 Artist Residency at Bryn Mawr College, the 2021 MANCC (Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography) Residency, the Movement Research Rosin Fund Residency, and the EYEBALA award at Gibney Dance.
She is currently the Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist-In-Residence Co-Advisor and New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks Advisor. love presently serves as an adjunct assistant professor at Queens College and the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School.
Find nia love on Instagram/Twitter/Facebook @nialovedance.
nia love's residency has been made possible through the Dance Program at Bryn Mawr College in partnership with the Performing Arts Series, with major support from the 360° Program, and the Mary Flexner Lectureship.