Friday November 8 * 7pm * $15-25 * TICKETS
Join us for two innovative collaborations between solo dancers and solo musicians: Oscar Suh-Rodriguez (butoh dance) & Keith Butler, Jr. (drums), and Christina Gesualdi (movement) & Jesse Kudler (guitar).
A Breeze May Take Me is a collaboration between butoh dancer Oscar Suh-Rodriguez and drummer-composer Keith Butler. The work explores themes of immortality and the abandonment of human beauty through elements of live improvisation and magic-reality invoking choreography.
LiliO is Oscar Suh-Rodriguez’s debut solo piece. The work calls upon the shapes of nature—plant, insect, and animal—to awaken the body’s magical anatomy, revealing a cleaner, newer human.
Oscar Suh-Rodriguez is a butoh dancer, guitarist, and multi-disciplinary artist based in northern New Jersey. He has studied closely with acclaimed butoh dancer and choreographer Vangeline and performed and collaborated with dancers throughout NYC. He holds a BFA in jazz performance from the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music and an MFA in Music Composition from Vermont College of Fine Arts. In 2023, he premiered his second solo guitar album KURO (2023) Rhizome DC. He is also the founder and lead producer for the indie label Kidokoro Records, through which he releases his solo project OSUKASU.
Having come of age in the cultural melting pot of Wilmington, North Carolina, Keith Butler, Jr. has deep roots in many musical traditions. Due in no small part to his versatility and creativity on the drum set, he has become a mainstay of the Washington D.C. music scene, performing with some of the area’s top bandleaders, including Brian Settles, Saltman/Knowles, Amy K. Bormet, Sarah Hughes, Luke Stewart, Elijah Jamal Balbed, Alex Hamburger, and Stephen Arnold. Butler was also a founding member of adventure music ensemble The New World, and is a member/composer of avant-jazz quartet ¡FIASCO! Butler has composed scores for DC productions of the plays Vietgone, and Venus (a staged reading,) both directed by Natsu Onoda-Power as well as Classic Red, a new play by DC playwright Abigail Chase. Butler released his debut album, Greener Grasses, in April of 2019, and is currently in the finishing stages of his second album. Butler is also a 2022 graduate of the MFA in Music Composition program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
The duo of Christina Gesualdi and Jesse Kudler explores the inter-dependence of movement and sound, with the boundaries between dancer and accompanist deliberately troubled; hierarchies between audio and visual constantly shift as byproducts of either medium become examined or picked up for elaboration in the other. The duo has been performing in art galleries, dance spaces, and concert venues since 2018.
Christina Gesualdi is a Philadelphia-based dancer, choreographer, improviser and teacher. She has danced in projects of Annie Wilson, Dawn Pratson, Megan Bridge, Curt Haworth, and Nicole Bindler. All into the process soup: attending to sensation, gentleness, listening, failing/flailing, queering, patience, indirectness and collaboration. Christina is a past member of Mascher Space and a community member at The Art Room Studio.
Jesse Kudler is a musician, composer, performer, and sound artist who plays and works with guitar, electronics, pipe organ, recordings, synthesizers, radios, tapes, movement, and text. His work is based in listening, improvisation, and collaboration (with people, devices, sites, and spaces) to explore ambiguous affects, perception, time, authorship, intention, agency, and modes and practices of listening.