WE ARE PROUD TO ANNOUNCE THE TWELFTH INSTALLMENT OF THE BRICK ARCHIVAL STREAMING SERIES – COMMUNITY EXERCISES FOR SANCTUARY SPACES

The Brick Theater proudly invites you to The Brick YouTube Channel for the video premiere of Community Exercises for Sanctuary Spaces on Thursday, September 17 at 8pm EST.

*Join us on The Brick Theater instagram at 7:30 for a pre-show chat session with Brendan Drake and Lena Engelstein!

***SIDE NOTE FROM THERESA – This is hands down my favorite show of the year. I have seen it 4 times live and, when going to the video to find a specific moment, just watched the entire thing. And I get to see so much great performance that I LOVE! But something about this one sticks to my soul.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtexMWlTSqPvIPoKbJPG_Qg

Filmed by Jon Burklund of Zanni Productions
Photos by Walter Wlodarczyk

COMMUNITY EXERCISES FOR SANCTUARY SPACES

Written, Directed and Choreographed by Brendan Drake in collaboration with performers: Quentin Burley, Lena Engelstein, Shannon Nash and Calvin Tsang

Music, Mind over Mirrors, Richard Rogers, Kate Bush, Stephen Shwartz. Soundscape by Brendan Drake

Additional text by Martin Scorsese and Arthur Miller.

Community Exercises for Sanctuary Spaces is an interdisciplinary work for five performers using movement, original text and sound to unearth how emulation and impersonation can function as a coping mechanism for navigating modern systems of gendered power dynamics and homophobia. Drawing explicit connections between the benediction of the blessed sacrament in Catholic Mass tradition, and the ritualistic nature that builds certain queer communities through mutual adulation for female icons and shared trauma, we show how the psychological understandings of how this type of fantasy and worship both helps and hinders the development of these social understandings.

Along with an underlying focus on pop cultural icons, the work posits a number of questions on the nature of what we mean when we reference a “safe space.” Similarly, this work interrogates how the word “sanctuary” plays a role in rooting itself in safety, and how that differs vastly across various artistic communities. For example, we are thinking deeply on how the studio or the theater is often a sanctuary space for dancers, drawing similarities to nightclubs as a longtime sanctuary space for queer life.

“COMMUNITY EXERCISES” is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department if Cultural Affairs, administered by the Brooklyn Arts Fund as well as a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.