chez bushwick

oriana on 1 Nov ’11

space type: dance studio | neighborhood: bushwick | active since: 2002 | links: website, facebook, myspace

Chez Bushwick, an artist-run dance studio and performance space, is one of the vanguards of the modern incarnation of Bushwick as an artist haven. Founded by choreographer Jonah Bokaer and cellist Loren Dempster, Chez Bushwick started out as a practice studio in an industrial loft, a place to give experimental dancers and choreographers room to gather, collaborate, practice, and create. Almost immediately they started hosting performances in the space, and it became a general gathering place for artists and creatives. I’ve seen at least a half-dozen shows there over the years—I used to live around the corner from Chez Bushwick, and it was one of the spaces that made the neighborhood magical.

Chez Bushwick rehearsal studio, photo from New York Social Diary

By 2008, Chez Bushwick had become a nonprofit, and since the craziness of Bushwick was already on the wane, they shifted their focus and began a partnership with the new LEED-certified dance space Center for Performance Research, which was cofounded by Bokaer and John Jasperse of Thin Man Dance. Now most of the performances happen at CPR, and Chez Bushwick is primarily used as a studio for dance rehearsals, artist workshops, and classes in yoga and capoeira. They have an annual program called Chez Bushwick Presents—an artist-run performance series highlighting work by emerging artists—and host some performances during festivals like Arts in Bushwick’s Beta Spaces, Bushwick Open Studios, and SITE Fest. Chez Bushwick also does community youth outreach in conjunction with the Coalition for Hispanic Family Services, among others.

photo by Michael Hart, from BushwickBK

According to Bushwick BK, “Chez Bushwick is a neighborhood arts anchor, an ambassador… for Bushwick’s creative community, and above all, a great place to hang out with your neighbors and watch some cutting-edge performance. It’s location is fitting: Chez Bushwick manufactures culture.” I couldn’t agree more.

Folk Feet, photo by Michael Hart from Brooklyn Arts Council

Q&A with Christina, program manager, and Lindsay, studio manager

brooklyn spaces: What are some favorite shows you’ve done or seen here?
Christina: About a year ago we produced David Wampach’s Bascule. He’s a French choreographer, and he came and rehearsed at Chez Bushwick with three New York–based dancers—Michelle Boulé, Liz Santoro, and Brian Campbell—and then the show was presented at CPR. It was a massive amount of work, but it was phenomenally well received, and it was really exciting to see. I also love Konic Thtr, whose show we co-produced at the CPR. They’re from Spain, they work with technology as much as with choreographers, and it’s very visual, they have a lot of projections, they’ve got a live-feed video mixed in with the movement. Otherwise I’m always delighted to work with a range of different artists who are all very inspiring and exciting. In the past year, just to name a few, we’ve worked with Anya Liftig, Tatyana Tenenbaum, and Ivanova Silva, who put together a show featuring choreographers and performers from Latin America, Japan, and Europe. I was so thrilled to see our small organization represent such a spectrum of perspectives.
Lindsay: For the last Bushwick Open Studios I was given the opportunity to bring together some performing artists, and that was wonderful. There’s something really free about that event, and the casualness of presenting really personal, important art that can and does exist without a lot of production.

Anya Liftig performing during Bushwick Open Studios 2011, photo by Christina deRoos

brooklyn spaces: What unites all the different work you present and support?
Christina: We’re definitely focused on contemporary choreography and performance, and on experimentation. We try to give artists full creative freedom, to support artists at all career stages, and to really look at what’s pushing the field forward, in terms of different approaches, different types of collaboration, uses of technology, or anything else.
Lindsay: The artists I’ve seen come through here have all been asking questions with their work. They’re not conserving or memorializing any kind of past ideology about art making; it’s all of the present.

Konic Thtr performing at CPR, photo by Christina deRoos

brooklyn spaces: What are your thoughts about being an arts organization in Bushwick these days?
Christina: I’m incredibly thankful overall to Bushwick. This is by far my favorite community I’ve ever been a part of. I came here a few years ago, along with many many many other artists who were leaving Dumbo, and it was incredible, there was an energy you could feel, creativity and freedom and openness and a real lack of rules. Now we’re all very aware that things are shifting. It feels like a loss of youth, even though I’m well aware that this neighborhood was here for a long long time before we came in, and it’s fraught with all the things that come with gentrification. But I can hold many truths at once, and among them is a sense that this is a very special time and place, and I remain, depending on the day, more or less hopeful about what the next phase might be. But there’s no doubt the dynamic has changed, and that changes not only the individual experience, it changes the creative output of this neighborhood, which impacts the city as a whole. What makes an organization like Chez Bushwick and the many other small nonprofits incredibly important is that this is where things begin. If you don’t have a very supported, open atmosphere at this level, then what you end up with at BAM is not going to be very interesting.

Andrew J. Nemr tapdancing, photo from Greenpoint Gazette

brooklyn spaces: What are your goals for the future of the space?
Lindsay: Dancers often have residencies out of town; you generally need to leave in order to truly dedicate time to what you’re doing. So we’ve been talking about ways to provide something like a staycation, but a stay-residency, to give people the opportunity to be at home, in their home space, and have their art in the same locality. There’s such an extraordinary need for that, especially for those who are just starting out. You can work in the dance field for a long time and still have very little support.
Christina: We’re also looking at improving the studio itself. We redid the floors this summer, we got a grant to put in soundproofing from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, who are just phenomenal. Also we’re looking at new ways to give support to people for whom maybe this is the first support they’ve ever gotten. I really want Chez Bushwick to help artists realize that if you get out of bed and feel good about the work you’re making, or even if you feel crappy but know that’s part of your process, that’s success. I want us to acknowledge people and the work they’re doing, to be a voice for everyone who says, “I’m not staking my entire life on ending up in MoMA; I make art because it’s a way of life.” I think that’s probably the biggest cultural driver we have. I just want to tell everybody: “You’re good! You’re doing amazing stuff! You’re driving this city! Nobody’s patting you on the back for it, but you are.”

student preparing for Nation of Nations peformance during CHFS’ Arts & Literacy Street Festival in Maria Hernandez Park, photo by Christina deRoos

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Like this? Read about other performance spaces: Vaudeville Park, Cave, Bushwick Starr, Clockworks Puppet Studio, Cave of Archaic Remnants, South Oxford Space, The Muse

ugly art room

oriana on 15 Oct ’11

space type: art gallery | neighborhood: greenpoint | active since: 2010 | links: website, facebook, twitter

Ugly Art Room is a lovely little contradiction. They don’t have an art room, and the art they’ve got is certainly not ugly. They’re a group of four—Jen, Scott, Julie, and Martin—that make up a roving curatorial art project, putting on site-specific shows in nontraditional venues, including the Parlour Brooklyn hair salon, Brouwerji Lanes, The Gutter, Dandelion Wine, and Paulie Gee’s pizzaria, among others. Their aim is to explore the relationship between the artwork presented and the venue in which it’s displayed.

Martin, Julie, Jen, Scott. This & all photos courtesy of Ugly Art Room.

Ugly Art Room has their headquarters in the Terminal Building in industrial Greenpoint, along with the Fowler Arts Collective. They’re incredibly busy, having put on eleven shows and featured over a hundred Brooklyn artists in the year they’ve been active. In addition, Jen runs the popular neighborhood blog Greenpointers, and Scott is the director of the Distillery Gallery in Boston. For the incredible Bring to Light New York festival, Ugly Art Room contributed “Peep Show,” essentially a walk-up set of View-Masters, where several photographic works were displayed stereoscopically. Next up they have a collage show called “All That Remains” opening at Picture Farm on October 21st and running through November 19th. Definitely check it out! But first check out my interview with Jen and Scott.

"Peep Show" at Bring to Light New York

Scott: We actually want to start by saying that we’re really excited to be on Brooklyn Spaces, because we pride ourselves on the fact that Ugly Art Room doesn’t have a space. We only put on shows in venues that aren’t typically art-designated. I think showing art in alternative venues is absolutely a legitimate way of exhibiting these days. We’re able to expose so many more people to art.

"Noise Jam" at The Gutter

brooklyn spaces: Okay, so tell me about doing “Peep Show” at Bring to Light. What was that experience like?
Jen: It was unbelievably great. The light show is a big outward display, so I wanted to bring it inward and make our piece a more intimate experience. I’m a photographer myself, which means I’m a very harsh judge of photography, so I like that we presented it in a really unique but also weirdly traditional old-school way.

"Girls & Boys: An Undidactic Probing" at Dandelion Wine

brooklyn spaces: How was the audience response?
Scott: It was awesome. There was always a crowd of people waiting to see what it was. Curiosity for us is key. People couldn’t just see something projected on the side of a building and then keep on walking. They had to want to see what everyone else was seeing.
Jen: That was another idea behind it, that the viewer would become part of the show, because while you’re viewing, you’re being viewed. That’s what we were doing too, standing off to the side watching, listening to people’s reactions. We got such a kick out of it.

"Opening Rejection" on Bedford Ave.

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about some other shows you guys have done.
Jen: We did one called “Opening Rejection,” which was a 6 x 6 x 6 white cube with all the art bolted to the walls inside. Scott built that, It was its own piece of artwork with artwork inside. He’s basically a wizard; he built “Peep Show” too.
Scott: “Opening Rejection” was cool because we got to put it on in two different places. First it was part of Northside Open Studios. They closed Bedford Ave for Williamsburg Walks, and we put the cube on the street and watched hundreds of people walk by, kind of wonder “What’s going on here?” and then go in and figure it out. That was super. And then we put it on Governor’s Island for the 4Heads Fair, which was a blast. Another cool show was “B Is for Bear,” which we put on in a daycare center as party of Bushwick Beta Spaces. That was another event we were so lucky to be a part of, because it was so well put together and so well attended.
Jen: Another show we did was “Landing Jam,” which Martin curated. It was in Greenpoint, in the skylit hallway of a third-floor walk-up, and all the work was abstract painting. It was art I didn’t initially relate to, but the way he put the show together and the feeling of it inside the space was terrific. I think it was one of the best examples of what Ugly Art Room does.
Scott: There’s a new show that Martin is working on, it’s a two-person show, with one painting from each person, and we’re going to reuse the 6 x 6 x 6 cube, but it’s going to be in a boxing ring, so you’ll actually climb up into the ring, into the mini-gallery, to view these two paintings facing each other. He describes the work as very ego, very self-involved.

"B Is for Bear" at Beta Spaces

brooklyn spaces: What are your thoughts on being artists and curators in Greenpoint?
Jen: We love Greenpoint! Ugly Art Room started during Greenpoint Open Studios. The sense of community and the support for the arts here, not only among artists and art enthusiasts but also among local businesses, is phenomenal. Fowler had a big opening and where twenty local businesses donated hundreds of dollars worth of gift certificates and merchandise for raffle.

"The Man, The Myth, The Moustache" at Brouwerji Lanes

brooklyn spaces: Are you inspired by living in Brooklyn?
Jen: Oh yeah, Brooklyn’s awesome. It’s always been a place that has identified itself outside of Manhattan. It has its own identity and its own grit and feel.
Scott: There’s so much talent here, the bar is set so high. You really have to give it so much more than your all in order to pull it off here, and that’s great. People respect it, people acknowledge it, people come out and support it. When you do put out the effort, it’s recognized, it’s not just lost in the shuffle.
Jen: It’s also a place where you can build your own community, your own scene. Ugly Art Room is building a community of art appreciators who look for art outside of traditional galleries, and I think Brooklyn is the perfect place to do that. A lot of people are here because they’re not into the art scene in Chelsea and they want to do something different.

"Head Space" at Paper Garden Records' Multiverse Playground

brooklyn spaces: What are your goals for the future?
Jen: We want Ugly Art Room to continue to put shows in unique locations and be able to sustain itself doing that. I want to continue to show Brooklyn artists, but at the same time, I think it would be cool for Ugly Art Room to expand. New York’s awesome, Brooklyn’s awesome, but there’s an entire world of weird places out there.

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Like this? Read about more art galleries: Wondering Around Wandering, 950 Hart, Concrete Utopia, Central Booking, Invisible Dog, Micro Museum, See.Me