LMCC presents the 21st annual River To River Festival, Downtown New York City’s leading free summer arts festival from June 12–26, 2022.
Experience a dazzling and wide-ranging array of dance and musical performances, visual art installations, film, participatory processions, family events, and more, all by groundbreaking artists in NYC.
This year, festival artists look to nature, ritual, and metaphysical wonders to offer a hopeful perspective on the future of public space.
Featured artists include: Gregory Corbino, Rose Desiano, keyon gaskin, Beth Gill, Jonathan Gonzalez, Craig Harris, Amy Khoshbin & Jennifer Khoshbin, Heather Kravas, and Okwui Okpokwasili & Peter Born.
Jonathan González
Practice by Jonathan González
On June 17 at 7pm, choreographer Jonathan González will premiere a new selection entitled Practice within the historic open-air setting of La Plaza.
Audience members turned party-goers celebrate the gift of gathering, and hold space for radical place-making and liberation.
In PRACTICE, Afro-Diasporic cultural idioms are interwoven through dance, sound, speech acts and design to incite the critical through-lines of creolized expressive arts formed within the greater Caribbean and Turtle Island.
Performed within the historic open-air setting of La Plaza at The Clemente Soto Veléz Cultural Center, this one night engagement invites audience members into the performative practice as party-goers to celebrate the gift of gathering, and hold space for the long emancipatory uses of culture by African-descendants in the supposed “New World” for radical place-making and liberation.
Food and drinks will be available for purchase.
Food provided by Que Chevere, drinks provided by Teatro La Sea and The Clemente.
Collaborators
Jonathan González, Choreographer
Rudy Gerson, Production Designer
William “DJ Embe” Catanzaro, Composer, Sound Designer, Musician, Percussionist, DJ
GENG, Composer, Sound Designer/Engineer
Karlala Soundsystem - Karl Scholz, Sound Engineer
Ali Rosa-Salas, Performer
Marguerite Angelica Monique Hemmings, Performer
Dani Criss, Performer
Jordan Lloyd, Performer
Fana Fraser, Performer
Maria Torres, New York Latin Hustle Dance Advisor
Chris Walker, Carnival/MAS Dance Advisor
Joiri Minaya, Original Artwork for Mesh
Willie Udell, Fabrication Consultant
Mixes by
Akeema-Zane
Zen Jefferson / DOVECAKE “Afrocelestial Meditation”
Yesenia Rojas "Tierra Olorí"
Jonathan González is an artist working at the intersections of choreography. Their practice examines conditions that figure Black life through research-based processes synthesized through performance usually generated collaboratively. Their writings have been published by Contact Quarterly, Cultured Magazine, deem journal, and Angela's Pulse. In 2019, González was a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” nominee for Breakout Choreographer. Their work ZERO (Danspace Project, St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, 2018) was nominated for a New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Award for Outstanding Production. They have received fellowships from the Art Matters Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Jerome Foundation, and have been an artist in residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, and Loghaven Artist Residency.
Co-commissioned by LMCC and The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center with support of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
Presented in partnership with The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center, with additional support from Brooklyn Academy of Music and Dance & Performance Institute, Trinidad & Tobago
Presented with the support of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels