My heavenly body
Surrounds you in the night
Though I’m out of sight
Can’t you feel me?
Caressing all your dreams
Forbidden fantasies
Ecstasies
That you hide away
Your heavenly body
Wants to explore
Don’t you dare ignore
Your heavenly body
In the depths of you
Is something true
You don’t want to see
That’s me
Meet me on the shore
I’ll take you
To the ocean floor
Where mystery awaits
When we get there
Don’t be scared
Just surrender
To the flow
Let go
Don’t know
Treasure elates
My heavenly body
Wants to liberate
Help you celebrate
All that you are
You can’t hide from me
I can see you in the night
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 Mothership LA 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. Art House and Stacy Dawson Sterns. Jessica has also curated art events at various locations in Los Angeles.
https://jessicaemmanuel.com/
Kearian Giertz is a LA based performance artist, choreographer, singer, and dancer. After completing their undergrad in dance and choreography at CalArts in 2016, they have collaborated vocally and choreographically with Rosanna Gamson World Wide, Acts of Matter, and Helios Dance Theater. Their choreographic work and art direction has been featured in music videos by PVRIS, Ryuji Imaichi, and Lisa Remar. In their own work they aim to reveal the complexities of inhabiting a body that exist between binaries.
“I’ve been learning how to step back a moment. Learning how to do that actively in your own life. So that you can receive… I have to be present with the work, as an artist, but I have to step back from that ego attachment… even if I think it’s meaningful it gets in the way!”
—Leon Finley, in this edition of Constellation Conversations
Leon Finley is an interdisciplinary artist and queer, trans person born in Seattle, the traditional land of the Coast Salish including the Duwamish People past and present. His work moves between performance, sculpture, drawing, sewing, writing and many places in between. His work is created from his experience having a physical and spiritual body and explores relationships between all kinds of bodies: human, animal, plant, object, sound, energy and the unseen. Leon works within a framework that understands that bodies are vibrating, that matter is not solid but is, in fact, moving, permeable and changeable. Leon is a Tarot Card reader and offers Akashic Records consultations; he understands both practices as interwoven into his work as an artist. Leon received his BFA from Cooper Union in 2009 and his MFA in sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 2012. Leon was the recipient of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust Prize in 2009, the Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize, the Dan David Prize Scholarship in 2012, and was a finalist for The Henry Art Gallery Brink Award in 2017. Leon has shown work around New York City, the traditional land of the Lenape People past and present and Seattle including galleries such as The Alice, Oxbow and the Jacob Lawrence gallery and has performed in venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art as a part of Kevin Beasley’s Public Programs in Sonic Masses and Movement Research as a part of the Open Performance Series. Leon has taught at Cooper Union, Virginia Commonwealth University and Montclair State University. He currently lives and works in Seattle, Washington.
Hymn to Deep House is about the depth of soul wisdom connoted by Neptune, and about the role that improvisatory and intuitive movement has played as a site for communion, revelation, and transcendence on the dance floor, particularly with the kind of house music that Josh Quat and Jomama Jones drew on as inspiration for this track. This week we invite you to participate in a DANCE CHALLENGE on WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 24th!
You can do as much or as little of the song as you wish. And let your deep soul wisdom guide your movement.
ALTAREDSTATES is made possible with generous support from the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Theater Project, with lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and additional support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Additional support provided by the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab.
Produced by CalArts Center for New Performance.
ALTAR NO. 1 is commissioned by The Public Theater, and created with support from CalArts Center for New Performance and New York Live Arts’ Live Feed Residency, with funding from Rockefeller Brothers Fund, National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Stavros Niarchos Foundation, and the Partners for New Performance.
