The NEW Chocolate Factory Theater
38-29 24th Street, LIC
Installation Documentation Video Still by Intrinsic Grey Productions (2021)
Good Day God Damn is a durational installation by interdisciplinary artist Stephanie Acosta that considers multi-crisis chaos, the mundane nature of the apocalypse, and the simultaneous impossibility, myth, and violence of the american landscape. Originally built as an ensemble performance for the Chocolate Factory Theater that never premiered, Good Day God Damn transmutes an unseen performance through the emotional landscape of 2020 in order to create a new work infused with the archive of its past experiments.
For the installation Good Day God Damn, Acosta draws from a range of aesthetic and tonal references such as theater backdrops, municipal buildings, american cinematic thrillers, cosmic near-futurism, and slow disaster. In the Chocolate Factory Theater’s new space, Acosta builds a site-specific landscape comprised of paintings that hold spatial and written echoes of performance scores and absurdist micro-plays, a sound world of cosmic opera tones, and moving-image elements that warp scale and our place within it. This environment places a viewer within Acosta’s performance-world, allowing one to receive direct transmission of sensorial elements and access a movement-driven encounter. By collapsing the temporal conventions of moving through an installation, attending an evening-length performance, and the durational nature of witnessing a landscape, Acosta attends to larger questions about the impossibility of comprehending the scale and scope of the apocalypse in all of its entirety.
Alexis Wilkinson: Exhibition Curator
Matt Shalzi: Exhibition Structure Design and Construction
Shana Crawford: Lighting Designer
Rory Murphy: Sound Engineer and Design
ALEXA GRÆ: Select Musical Score Composition
Ryan Holsopple: Projection Design
Aspects of the Good Day God Damn series and it’s research were cultivated in collaboration with a team of artists including it’s core performance ensemble Leslie Cuyjet, Miriam Gabriel, Angie Pittman, and Jessie Young, leading up to a world premiere performance at The Chocolate Factory Theater in 2020.
▲▲▲ POSTPONED DUE TO COVID-19 ▲▲▲
PERFORMANCE WORLD PREMIERE | MARCH 19-28 2020 | The Chocolate Factory Theater
In a multi-frame assemblage of video projection, the cinematic lens, and the theatrical frame, the performers of Good Day God Damn - four dancers, an opera singer, and an ill fated screeching director - move as an organic sentient mass through multiple atmospheres and states, exploring ideas of the cinematic thriller and extraterrestrial hope in an attempt to disassemble, rebuild, and hold onto the very notion of survival in an absurd multi-crisis reality, asking: what does it mean to get through it? Dissonant sounds and images give way to choral moments in a darkly thrilling and dynamic disarray.
ENSEMBLE COLLABORATORS
Leslie Cuyjet is a collaborator and performer with an array of artists and choreographers including Will Rawls, Juliana F. May, Jane Comfort, Kim Brandt, Stephanie Acosta, and Cynthia Oliver. For sustained achievement, she was awarded a 2019 Bessie Award for Outstanding Performer. Her own work has been presented in venues across New York City by MoMA PS1, La MaMa, Gibney Dance, Center for Performance Research, Movement Research, AUNTS, and Danspace Project’s DraftWork series.
Miriam Gabriel is a performer and creator involved in live performance and film. She was born in Baltimore, MD, raised in Princeton, NJ, and currently resides in Jersey City, NJ. She co-creates video work with Zora Schiltz-Rouse and Sophia de Baun. She makes dance work with Carlo Antonio Villanueva. She currently performs with Kyle Marshall Choreography, Maya Lee-Parritz, and Stephanie Acosta. She has created and performed dances with Kayla Farrish, GREYZONE, Zultari Gomez, Lisa Fagan and Sarah Lifson. She has worked with the Stephen Petronio Company and the Merce Cunningham Trust. She also works around New Jersey and New York as a domestic worker and food server. She is a graduate of Rutgers University with a BFA in Dance.
Angie Pittman is a New York based Bessie award-winning dance artist, dance maker, and dance educator. Her work has been performed at The Kitchen, Gibney Dance, BAAD!, Movement Research at Judson Church, Triskelion Arts, STooPS, The Domestic Performance Agency, The KnockDown Center, The Invisible Dog(Catch 73), and Danspace Project. Angie’s work resides in a space that investigates how the body moves through ballad, groove, sparkle, spirit, spirituals, ancestry, vulnerability, and power.
Jessie Young is a choreographer working in dance, performance and embodied pedagogy. Her work is grounded in a practice of corporeal self-reflection which she uses to investigate personal, familial, and fictional histories. In New York, her work has been presented by New York Live Arts, where she was a Fresh Tracks Artist-in-Residence (2017-18), Danspace Project (DraftWork), AUNTS (Mount Tremper residency), Brooklyn Studios for Dance, DåncēHøLø, Women in Motion and The Current Sessions. She has collaborated and performed with Abby Z and the New Utility, Khecari Dance Theater and The Seldoms, amongst others. She is currently collaborating as a performer with Julie Mayo, Stephanie Acosta and Isaac Pool. She has a BFA from the University of Utah and an MFA from the University of Illinois Urbana – Champaign. She is on faculty at Rutgers University, Mark Morris Dance Group and Gibney Dance. Her forthcoming work, “smoke not fog,” will premiere in NYC Fall 2020.
ALEXA GRÆ, is a multi-disciplinary artist. A graduate of Northwestern University where they received a Master's degree in Vocal Performance and Literature, a Certificate in Performance, and Bachelor Degrees in Vocal Performance and Composition from Texas Tech University. They have performed with companies such as Haymarket Opera Company, Madison Opera, and Elements Contemporary Ballet. In 2018 ALEXA released their first studio song cycle titled ‘SEEN’ a mix of genres spanning from classical art song to house music accompanied by the premiere of ‘Sur La Nuit’ an operatic/electronic music video
Good Day God Damn, Video Still 2017, Stephanie Acosta
RESIDENCIES + IN PROCESS SHOWINGS
Good Day God Damn - In Progress Showing
Museum of Art and Design | March 24, 2018 | 7p
This live event will include two GDGD ensemble members live, along with artist Stephanie Acosta and others in absentia. Shifting theatre to installation site, Good Day God Damn incorporates video, sound, and live work to explore the first in a multi-installment series engaging movement research and experimental film structures to tear through the personal in the terrain. [Dur. 35-40m]
Performers/Collaborators:
Performing Live Angie Pittman + Leslie Cuyjet
with Stephanie Acosta
Video + Performance developed with Mimi Gabriel + Jessie Young
Sound + Lights - Dan Foley
Images by Heidi Bohnenkamp
Good Day God Damn - Extracted Excerpt
Pies and Performance | Crown Heights, Brooklyn | 8p
[Dur. 15 min]
Performers/Collaborators: Performing Live Mimi Gabriel + Jessie Young
with Stephanie Acosta
Video + Performance developed with Angie Pittman + Leslie Cuyjet
Images by Intrinsic Grey Productions (James Tate, Vid Stills)