the cave of archaic remnants

oriana on 20 Nov ’13

space type: art studio & performance venue | neighborhood: crown heights | active since: 2012 | links: facebook

The Cave is a huge basement studio in an artists’ loft building in Crown Heights. It’s a multifaceted space: part performance venue, part rehearsal studio, part gallery, part community gathering space, and it’s inhabited by a collective of musicians, dancers, sculptors, and artists.

all photos by Alix Piorun

Currently the Cave is being used as a set for an immersive dance performance called “The Cave: Archaic Remnants and the Methods of Transfer.” That name encompasses the space (the Cave), the dancers (Archaic Remnants), and the musicians (Methods of Transfer). The set, sculptures, and installation were designed by Laura Cuille, and nearly a dozen artists contributed music, dance, choreography, and more.

There will be one final performance of this unique site-specific piece on November 21st—buy tickets here. But first read my Q&A with Laura and two other contributors, Don and Arielle.

brooklyn spaces: Laura, how did the idea of this performance come about?
Laura: We all came into this space a year ago, and there was already music going on, and visual arts, and movement, but it was really loose and divided. At the time I was making life-size sculptures, and the idea of working with music and dance was in the back of my head. I was actually looking for a different space to install the sculptures, but then I realized I could put them here. So I started building the set and it just clicked that this was something we could all do together and all build off of to make it a whole.

brooklyn spaces: Don, how did the music come together? Were you inspired by the sculptures?
Don: We were collaborating together but separately, if that makes sense. The energy of creation ended up bringing our practices to a solid line instead of two parallel lines. Laura and I are kind of the same, as far as the way we work. I’m the audio version of her.

brooklyn spaces: Arielle, what’s your role?
Arielle: I’m behind the scenes, helping. I’m like the host.

brooklyn spaces: How would you describe the show to someone who hasn’t seen it or will never seen it? What are you trying to evoke with the performance?
Don: I would call it a Pompeii cave sculpture with visual stimulation and movements to cinematic music. It’s not that I wouldn’t call it dance, but I think it’s a little different. It’s almost like live shadow puppets feeding off of the music.
Laura: I think the theme is really universal. I was reading Carl Jung’s The Red Book while I was working on this piece—I’ve always been inspired by music and literature to drive me in my art. And I’ve always worked with the human figure because that’s all we can really perceive of. With the Cave it came to me like a spark, because I was just dealing with raw human emotion and psyche and all the things that are at the root of what drive us and have not changed in the history of human existence. All the other shit in society is basically just decoration and different ways to confuse what’s actually driving us, which is really raw and primal. The symbol of the Cave, and then the dance and the music—it explores all these themes, the primal human condition, confusion and pain and all these things, and accepting it more than trying to find a conclusion to it.

Arielle: Piña Bauche’s dance troupe describes themselves as a “theatrical dance company,” and they use that notion of theatre. There’s something so cinematic about the music in this piece, there’s a sort of theatrical interpretation of movement, symbols that come across with the sound as a sort of shadow and reflection of the dance. And the music, it feels like a movie score. The way it builds and falls is really cinematic. And also, the idea with this piece is that you stay in the Cave, you never leave it. After most performances you leave a space immediately, so whatever experience you’ve had or however it’s affected you, you take it with you, alone. But for this, we’ve brought other artists and musicians to continue performing after the performance, incorporating the vibe or energy from the show. That way, for the audience, whatever feelings you’re having, you don’t have to be isolated with them and you don’t have to just leave. So this isn’t an isolated performance, it’s a performance within a context, within a space, and within what’s to come afterward.

brooklyn spaces: Have any of you ever done a site-specific, multi-faceted performance like this before?
Arielle: No, it was new for everyone involved.
Don: But doing it all this in the space made it really comfortable, almost like playing in my living room. Which is not to say that I didn’t get nervous; I definitely did.
Laura: I agree, the process was so natural. It just moved so easily and so magically.

brooklyn spaces: What are your thoughts on being an artist in Crown Heights these days?
Don: I love it here. I think it’s the perfect blend of people. It’s all ages, and it’s not loud; Bushwick, which I do love, is just a lot louder. People are working really hard all over the place there, but Crown Heights is a little more mysterious, there are all these random things happening. There are a bunch of people doing really cool things right in this building. There’s a dude building boats! Tug boats, like pure wood, cedar and stuff. The people around here are so interesting, and there’s so much passion.
Arielle: This neighborhood is a lot more community based, and a lot less commercial. It just seems so natural.

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Like this? Read about more unconventional performance spaces: Gowanus Ballroom, Gemini & Scorpio Loft, Brooklyn Lyceum, Dead Herring, Bushwick Starr, Cave, Chez Bushwick

the muse

oriana on 15 Jan ’12

space type: aerialist venue | neighborhood: williamsburg, bushwick | active since: 2011 | links: website, facebook, twitter

Update, spring 2015: Last winter, Vice magazine took over two adjoining buildings on the Williamsburg waterfront, evicting several underground spaces in one fell swoop: Death By Audio, Glasslands, and the Muse, which actually got pushed out due to construction before the end of their lease. Undaunted, the Muse family Kickstarted more than $60,000, and in April 2015 they reopened an enormous new space in Bushwick.

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The Muse is an aerialist performance and workshop space in South Williamsburg dedicated to fostering experimental creativity, and giving artists the space and time to try out new things. It was founded in late 2011 by Angela Buccinni, a dancer, acrobat, and aerialist, and Yuval Oz, a musician and acrobat.

Angela as a reindeer in Hot Frosty (photos by Maximus Comissar unless noted)

The space is a former garage for Domino Sugar, which Angela and Yuval built out from scratch—in only two months they did the living space with six rooms on two floors, an elevated stage, a bathroom, and a kitchen, as well as put in rigging points throughout the main performance area. They’ve gotten an outpouring of help from Williamsburg artists, and have a close partnership with Karen Fuhrman’s aerial dance company Grounded Aerial, of which Angela is also member. In addition to performances, the Muse offers classes and workshops in hand-balancing, acrobatics, silks, harness, trick ropes, kudayo, and lots more.

I was lucky enough to be invited over to the Muse for the dress rehearsal of Grounded Aerial’s first annual holiday show, Hot Frosty. I got to hang out with Karen, Angela, Yuval, and the rest of the incredibly happy and nice cast, plus Angela and Yuval’s collection of wonderful dogs.

 

Hot Frosty cast shot

brooklyn spaces: Karen, can we start with a quick run-down of Grounded Aerial?
Karen: Grounded does three things. We do corporate events, for companies like IBM, Microsoft, and H&R Block—the bigger the better. That tends to fund the second thing: our theatrical ventures, like Insectinside, which is an evening-length piece, equal parts dance, theatre, and aerial, and Hot Frosty, which is little scenes peppered throughout the evening, singing, dancing, aerial, over here, over there, above your head, on the stage, on the wall—it’s happening all around you as you’re hanging out drinking cocktails with your friends. The third thing we do is classes, which everyone should come out and take. They’re not only for dancers; anyone could put a harness on, even my mom. It’s an amazing workout, and it’s really empowering.

photo from The Muse’s Facebook

brooklyn spaces: What’s the link between Grounded and the Muse?
Karen: We support each other, we love each other. There’s a beautiful aerial community in Williamsburg, and Angela and Yuval having this space will really reinforce that community. It’s going to be an outstanding force.

brooklyn spaces: Angela and Yuval, what was your motivation for starting the space?
Angela: I think one of the main problems with trying to create art in New York City is that it’s so hard to survive financially that people can’t invest time in the creation process, to actually sit in your work, soak in it, develop it. With Grounded we do that a lot, we play with things, we improv, we throw things out, we get new things, we merge ideas. So part of the whole concept behind the Muse is that we want to support that kind of creation process, to ensure that there’s a place for people to do that.
Yuval: We really want to create an atmosphere for taking time for creation, for experimenting, a place when you can do everything and try everything. I think this is part of doing art.
Angela: We want it to be comfortable here, like you’re sitting in a living room, with no sense of judgment. We want that sort of calm energy, where it’s safe to go into the process and get lost in your art and feel okay, and to actually work off of the other things and people in the space.

brooklyn spaces: So tell me a quick history of the space itself.
Angela: That’s a long story. I had an outdoor dance studio in my backyard in Bushwick called Studio 43. We produced a few shows and then, do you remember the tornado we had last year? Well, it ripped up a tree from the lot next door and crushed everything. Around that time I was offered a tour that took me to Israel. One day while I was rehearsing there, this beautiful dog wandered into the theatre, and I jumped off the stage and just started hugging him. And Yuval came in looking for Shesek and found me. I think he had actually told Shesek, “Go fetch that girl.”
Yuval: That’s your version!
Angela: So Yuval and I hung out while I was doing the tour, and then I stayed in Israel. We almost opened the Muse in Tel Aviv; we were really looking, but we ultimately decided to raise some money with a Kickstarter and then come back do it here. A friend told us about this space, we came and we looked at it, and that was it. It’s amazing. There’s nothing in the cards to say we should be able to do this right now, but somehow we’re doing it. We have a long way to go, but it’s in motion. Whenever we don’t have enough money for the next thing, we have a show or a party to raise money. We had a ’70s disco party in November to pay for a hot-water heater.

Join the Circus Day (photo from The Muse’s Facebook)

brooklyn spaces: How many people are involved?
Angela: At least thirty, thirty-five people have popped in once or twenty times or a million times. It’s all artists, it’s like a big community. And it’s normally a social event; we cook together and then we build. Or I melt down and everyone hugs me and then we build. There’s a lot of that too.
Yuval: It’s a great way to discover new friends and good people.
Angela: We’ve had complete strangers come help us. People tease us that we’re basically building an artists’ kibbutz. And we’re always looking to expand it!
Yuval: Also we’re always searching for trades. People can come help us and then get free classes in hand-balancing, harness, silk, bungee, anything.

brooklyn spaces: Are you involved in the larger aerial and dance community in Brooklyn? Are people coming from House of Yes or Big Sky Works or Streb?
Angela: A lot of aerialists are involved, a lot of freelance artists. Yuval and I just received a grant from Streb to produce one of the pieces for his show. In my experience, aerialists are all allies, it’s not competitive or nasty.

brooklyn spaces: How has it been going with the build-out?
Angela: Demolition was a little harder than we thought.
Yuval: A lot of people ask us, like, construction is crazy, why don’t you just pay professional people for this? And we’re like, it’s not that hard. I mean, okay, it is hard, but it’s not that complicated, you just have to go step by step by step. Actually, we’re both glad that we didn’t know everything we would have to do before we get started, because we would have never done it.

photo from The Muse’s Facebook

brooklyn spaces: Do you think your creativity or your process is influenced by being in Williamsburg?
Angela: I think it’s more supportive here than it was in Bushwick. There’s more like-minded artists. I can call someone with an idea, and they’ll feed on it and fuel me. Or we know we’ll have the audience we need to fill the space.
Karen: Absolutely. Williamsbug just has a zest to it, a roughness, a rawness, a curiousness, a youthfulness that people feed off. It’s an amazing community. It’s really unique.

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Like this? Read about more aerial and dance spaces: House of Yes, Big Sky Works, Chez Bushwick, Cave

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

bushwick starr

oriana on 22 Apr ’11

neighborhood: bushwick | space type: theatre | active since: 2001 | links: website, facebook, twitter

The first play I saw at Bushwick Starr was The Ring Cycle Parts 1&2, a recontectualizing of Wagner‘s famous opera set in America in the eighties, seen through the lens of trickle-down economics and WWF wrestling. It was outrageously great, and even our friends visiting from Brussels were impressed. The next time I made it back was for Winter in the Woods, a series of vignettes around the theme of winter, which featured a spooky theremin player, a troupe dancing backward, women as swans, marionettes fighting their handlers, and so much more awesomeness.

still from The Ring Cycle (from pacopenguin's Flickr)

Bushwick Starr provides a small, intimate theatre-going experience, where a handful of audience members sit on the floor, and you don’t even need to bring your glasses. They’re a nonprofit, doing innovative and locally focused work, giving artists and groups a forum to grow and experiment, with consistently high-quality creative results. This weekend (Aprli 22 & 23) is this year’s Big Green Theater Festival, an interactive environmental-education program focused on teaching kids about their environment and community in creative ways. Get your tickets already! But first, check out my interview with Sue, Bushwick Starr’s founder.

still from Winter in the Woods

brooklyn spaces: Tell me a bit about the history of the space.
Sue: The Bushwick Starr began as a developmental space for the New York–based theater company Fovea Floods, Inc. Our company was looking for a large rehearsal space for a show we were producing at the (then) Ontological-Hysteric Theatre in the East Village, and when we found the loft in Bushwick, we fell in love. In 2004, we fully converted the space into a black-box venue while producing a large-scale theatrical run. And as the neighborhood of Bushwick began to transform into a thriving artistic nexus, we decided to open our doors to other artists. So it was really less of a decision to open up a theater in Bushwick, than it was a gradual transition from a private space to a public venue. We’ve grown into a thriving theatrical venue, a vital neighborhood arts center, and a destination for exciting and engaging performance.

from Bushwick Starr's Facebook page

brooklyn spaces: What have been some of your favorite shows?
Sue: One of our favorites was Pass Kontrol‘s New Hope City in the spring of 2010. It was an apocalyptic rock-opera / allegory set in the future of a New York–type city, created and conceived by a local Bushwick rock band. The show was an unexpected runaway hit, because it perfectly represented a reflection—a moment—of the Bushwick community spirit. It’s DIY, it’s cutting-edge, it’s full of promise and creativity, and it’s hopeful at its core. Another highlight was Half Straddle‘s In the Pony Palace / FOOTBALL in the spring of 2011. Half Straddle is an up-and-coming company in an exciting moment of growth. It’s always our goal to catch budding companies and offer them some valuable and productive time to develop their work, while giving them all of our support to get their work seen, and it’s extremely rewarding for us to be a part of that journey. We want to help companies put on a show, but we also want people to take notice of the work, and just generally get excited about something new—and they certainly did with Pony Palace. Our relationship with Half Straddle on this production was a great fit, and I think the fact that the run was sold out and we received so much press is a testament to both of us making the most of a special moment for our organizations, and working together to forge ahead.

still from Scary Monsters (from Bushwick Starr's Facebook page)

brooklyn spaces: Is there an overarching theme or idea for the types of shows you put on?
Sue: We present new or developing work from primarily NYC-based experimental theater and dance artists. We like to work with groups that have a strong vision and something to say artistically. We also choose people who have established their voice and their audience but are still in a moment of growth, so that the support we offer them will have value and impact. If you look at our current season, you can get an idea of the type of work / artistic style we lean toward—Half Straddle, PL115, Witness Relocation, and 31 Down, all of which are making experimental, cutting-edge work.

photo from Bushwick Starr's Facebook page

brooklyn spaces: What is the space’s relationship with the neighborhood & community?
Sue: The Bushwick Starr is an organization defined by both our artists and our community. With this in mind, we have created annual offerings like The Bushwhack Series, a festival highlighting local talent; Band of Puppets Fest, a showcase of puppetry for families in our community; and the environmentally driven Big Green Theater Festival, which brings the youth of Bushwick directly in touch with professional theater. We are in the heart of Bushwick, and at the crossroads of our neighborhood’s unique culture, history, and community. We strive to unite these elements within an artistic forum and serve as a place where both artistic and community-based dialogue can be encouraged and explored.

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Like this? Read about other performance spaces: Chez Bushwick, Clockworks Puppet Studio, South Oxford Space, Cave, Bushwick Project for the Arts, Cave of Archaic Remnants, Vaudeville Park

cave

oriana on 5 Jan ’11

photo by Jonathan Slaff from twi.ny

neighborhood: williamsburg | space type: performance / art space | active since: 1996 | links: website, tumblr

CAVE, led by video artist/curator Shige Moriya and theater-dance director/dancer Ximena Garnica, is a tiny experimental and alternative art space, one of the longest-running in Williamsburg. Their stated goal is to “maintain an environment that attracts, provokes and supports exchange, generative confrontation and collaboration among emerging and established artists and audiences from diverse cultures and artistic backgrounds.” To this end they hold workshops, performances, commissions, and exhibits, both solo and collaboratory, along with annual festivals and artist-in-residency programs.

In the nineties and early aughts, the space had a broader scope, including visual arts of all kinds, music, dance, and other types of performance. In the last decade, CAVE has refined its focus, and now primarily presents and nurtures innovative varieties of dance and performance art, and has become one of the New York hubs for butoh, a Japanese conceptual dance movement.

photo by Claudia La Rocco from New York Times

Many of the performances and events in the biennial New York Butoh Festival are held here, and CAVE  jointly established New York Butoh-Kan, an ongoing intensive training program that brings butoh masters from Japan to give classes and seminars in Brooklyn.

CAVE also offers short- and long-term artist-in-residence programs, and hourly rentals of its dance studio.

photo from www.cavearts.org

Q&A with Bryan, a former CAVE artist-in-residence

brooklyn spaces: Why is it called CAVE, and what is the history of the space from your perspective?
Bryan: Shige Moriya started the space back in 1996 with a few friends. He is the only originator who still lives there. Shortly thereafter he met Ximena, and their loving relationship has conceived of, sponsored, spawned, incubated, and nurtured innumerable beautiful works. I think it was called CAVE just because the space is rather cave-like on the inside. Living there, I liked to fancy it like how I imagined the inside of the Batcave works, you know: over here is where we work out antidotes to poisons, over there is the machine that keeps profiles of the world’s most dangerous people, this is the bulletproofing cloakroom, etc. I should really encourage them to install a firepole.

brooklyn spaces: What drew you to CAVE, and how long did you live there?
Bryan: I saw a performance there many years ago and was mesmerized. Yuko Kaseki took my breath away, and the images of her movements became scorched onto my brain forever. Much later, I was working a boring office job and had spare time outside of my musical endeavors, and was just feeling under-spun, so I answered a Craigslist add for a job with CAVE. It was for a very lowly sounding position, a stamp-licker or something, which was what made me think I could handle it. But after I interviewed with Ximena and Shige, they made me the Workshop Director for the 2007 New York Butoh Festival. This meant that I was responsible for the registration and attendance of over a hundred dancers from around the world, as well as accounting for thousands of dollars of participants’ money and generally making sure the workshops went smoothly. It was daunting, but Ximena and Shige giving more confidence to me than I would have given to myself really helped me to grow. I wound up living at CAVE two separate times, for about eight months each time, between my two trips to Indonesia.

photo from CAVE's Facebook

brooklyn spaces: How did CAVE help you with your art?
Bryan: CAVE helped me with my art inside and out and everywhere in between. Aesthetically, learning about butoh, studying with masters from Japan, interviewing them for my radio program, watching it manifest, soundtracking choreographies… All of these things deepened my aesthetics and helped expand how I understand living and breathing. Meeting people was the other most remarkable impact of living and working through CAVE. One worker there, Claire Duplaniere, told me about a scholarship in Indonesia, and now I am living here on my third scholarship. Another artist-in-residence, Yana Km, found out about one of the same scholarships through me, and now she’s living here too. So things like this have really been life-changing. And it is cyclical. I had the privilege of working with Yuko Kaseki, the first butoh dancer I ever saw perform and still one of my very favorites, on a video I filmed with my band, Bloody Panda. I helped organize a music festival with CAVE two years ago, and artists who met that day are still making recordings together in different contexts. It’s thrilling to think about the potential that such a collective provides.

brooklyn spaces: What were the best and worst things about living there?
Bryan: Living there really makes you become hyper-conscious of how you conduct yourself. You’re a worker and a friend, helping to create art while helping the functioning of this non-profit collective. Personalities can clash. It taught me a lot about how to keep everyone’s best intentions in mind and to always try to show mine, especially after making mistakes.

brooklyn spaces: How does the community respond to CAVE?
Bryan: In an amazing way. CAVE’s loyal audience is responsible for the fact that just about every performance there sells out. I remember once when I was running the box office, I had to console people who hadn’t made reservations to a sold-out performance. “It’s a nice sunset over there on the East River, though, yeah?” Maybe they wanted to punch me, but instead they smiled.

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Like this? Read about other performance spaces: Chez Bushwick, South Oxford Space, Bushwick Starr, The Muse, Cave of Archaic Remnants