CITY OF WOM_N

CITY OF WOM_N is Catherine Galasso’s ongoing five-borough performance series, in which historical memoir, contemporary interview, and abstract tableaux combine to form portraits of female luminaries, interrogating the criteria for who is remembered and how.

The first installment, for Staten Island, was co-presented with the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor in May 2023.

This page is primarily dedidated to the Staten Island installment.
More information about the next installment, in Queens 2024/2025, coming soon....

Support This Dance

2023 CITY OF WOM_N: STATEN ISLAND. Photo by Catalina Kulczar.

The CITY OF WOM_N project was conceived in response to a map envisioned by Rebecca Solnit, in which the stops of the NYC Subway system are renamed after women (Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, UC Press, 2016). Each chapter of the WOM_N series is an independent, stand-alone work, created in response to the site in which it takes place, incorporating historical subjects from that particular borough, and realized with a cast of all femme-identifying artists.

I have choreographed dances for underground bank vaults, marble staircases, apple orchards, and opera houses. My performances, realized with casts of 2-25 performers, are playfully self-aware, highly sculptural, and singularly reflective of the spaces they inhabit and the people inside. I use humor, pedestrian virtuosity, and memorable characters to entertain, provoke, and create points of entry for people from all walks of life.

My style is rooted in postmodern abstraction, but the tone is quirky, defiant, contrasting historical nods with a pop sensibility. Collaboration is central to my process. My job is to create a space where every person can do their best work and find joy in the process.

This latest work reflects my history of working across disciplines; my formal training includes documentary filmmaking, painting, and theater. I seek to make postmodern dance more inviting to people of all backgrounds by incorporating elements from these other disciplines, supplementing with historical entry-points and narrative throughlines. The subjects of my dances (Bocaccio’s Decameron, or the Lumiere Brothers) are usually obscure and rarely topical, so this project represents a departure. Women’s issues are, unfortunately, more urgent than ever.

THE TEAM

Part 1 features performances by:
Beatriz Abbate and Rosita Roldan
(plus the voice of Idea Viola Reid)

Part 2 features performances by:
Katherine De La Cruz, Neva Guido, Kim Savarino, Kimiko Tanabe, Meghann Trago

choreography by Catherine Galasso in collaboration with the performers
music composed and performed by Catherine McRae
lighting designer Christina Tang
costume designer Karen Boyer
creative producer Emma Rose Brown
stage management Erin Gray
dramaturgical support Sheryl Sutton
cast portraits by Catalina Kulczar

COLLABORATOR BIOS

CITY OF WOMEN: STATEN ISLAND (Spring 2023)

BeaTriZ Abbate

Beatriz Abbate is a lifelong Staten Islander. She has been dancing with Ballet Imagination for six years, and has just begun exploring contemporary dance. She has performed previously in the Staten Island Dance Festival and a few other public performances, but generally she prefers dancing in private while singing karaoke. Bea is a top-notch student in sixth grade at Notre Dame Academy with a love for science and math. She plans to apply her love of movement and science to become a jet pilot, with the ultimate goal of working for NASA, or even better: the SETI Institute. Her parents would like you to know that Bea is quite possibly the nicest person you may ever meet.

Katherine De la cruz

Katherine De La Cruz is an Afro-Dominican dancer and choreographer based in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated in 2020 from Hunter College with both a BA in Anthropology and Dance. Katherine has performed in various venues and festivals both live and virtually including City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival, The Estrogenius Festival, The American Dance Festival, The WP theater, Movement Research at the Judson Church, The Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, Arts on Site’s Women in Motion, Brookfield Place and more. She has performed in works by Larry Keigwin, Blakeley White-McGuire, Monica Bill Barnes & Co, The Soul Dance Company, Andre Haenggi, and Maura Donohue Nguyen. Katherine has used dance to support climate justice and immigrants’ rights causes in New York City. She believes that dance is a powerful tool for community building and bridging divides. Katherine is a passionate choreographer whose work centers around themes of social inequality, LGBTQ+ stories, familial ties, immigration and mental health. Most of her work is born from a need to make direct political statements and to make visible often ignored inner healing processes. She is also an avid reader, baker and seamstress.

NEVa guido

Neva Marie Guido is an artist and performance maker based in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated with a BFA in Dance from the University of the Arts Philadelphia in 2021, but considers herself still, continuously, studying. She has performed in the works of Isabel Lewis, and at the CAMPING festival in Pantin, France in the works of Lauren Baskt, and Kim Itoh. Neva’s work tries to multiply the space between the performer and the audience until there is not a space at all. Constructing works that make-like forests, and watching forests with the intensity of an audience, she studies meanings, follows angels, trips, falls and trips again into the space between us, the space of possibility suspended in time.

Catherine mcrae

Catherine McRae is a composer and violinist and makes music for live film, dance, theater, visual artists and solo performance. Incorporating electronics and loopers into her toolkit, she has developed a sonic vocabulary that forms intricate and cinematic landscapes. Working with a wide array of visual and performance artists has deeply informed her approach to space, time and texture in her compositions. Collaborators include visual artist and poet Jen Bervin (Faire et défaire); choreographers Catherine Galasso (Dances for Doing, Cloud Dance 2.0, Field Notes) and Johanna S. Meyer (Maps); filmmakers Sam Green (Utopia in 4 Movements, Fog, The Measure of All Things), Jem Cohen (Empires of Tin), Danny Williams (Factory Films); theater makers Radiohole (Now Serving), Joseph Silovsky (Send for the Million Men, Who’s Oklahoma), Findlay//Sandsmark ((re)remember study); audiobook sound designer Ben Williams (Bird Lovers, Backyard by Thalia Field); writer Nick Tosches (Fuck the Living Fuck the Dead), and many musicians including T. Griffin (Quavers), Ben Dickey, Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine, Vic Chesnutt, and Lumberob. She has performed extensively at clubs, festivals, museums, galleries, basements and rooftops.

ROSITA ROLDAN

Rosita Roldan (Dancer/Choreographer/Performer/Visual artist) has been dancing most of her life. In her early 20’s she was awarded a full dance scholarship from The New Dance Group and a work scholarship from Ballet Hispanico. Later Rosita studied at the Martha Graham School. She has performed with numerous dance companies including: The Duncan Dance Collective, Return of The Sun, 911 Roving Dancers, Andrea Del Conte and The American Spanish Dance Theatre, UTA On The Rock Dancers, Living Through Movement and Co-founder of the Dar Vida Dance Theater to name a few. Her recent credits include: Jazz Hands Virtual performance, 2021 as a director, choreographer and visual artist; Dancing Within The Lines/Creative Dance Collective, 2018; Transmission A Decade with Melissa West, 2019; There Goes The Neighborhood Documentary with Alethea Pace, 2021; and Universal Temple of The Arts, Love In Bloom, 2022. Rosita’s passion is to utilize her inner voice to express a shared human experience by combining movement, visual art and the natural world to elevate, expand and engage the viewer. Rosita would like to thank Catherine Galasso for the opportunity to participate and contribute to the City of Wom_n: Harbor project. Rosita Roldan (Art and moving images) on Instagram @rositaroldan5346.

Kim savarino

Kim Savarino is an artist working in film, theater, and dance. She creates performances that weave together folklore and movement, in spaces ranging from traditional stages to concrete backlots to (once) an old bathroom in a former mental hospital. Her work has received support from MANCC’s Forward Dialogues Lab, the EstroGenius Festival, and Arts@Renaissance. She’s created collaborative performances with Shiloh Hodges (seven bones), guzheng player Clae Lu (Toshi Reagon's Sacred Revolution), and members of the Great Jones Rep (nauageo). Performance highlights include a Broadway lab choreographed by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, playing the prophetess Cassandra in Andrei Serban’s sold-out revival of The Trojan Women (La MaMa), and nearly 1,000 performances of Then She Fell, Third Rail Projects’ Bessie award-winning immersive hit. Kim has worked with artists including Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Romeo Castellucci, Miguel Gutierrez, Maura Nguyen Donohue, and Dan Safer; she joined La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company in 2019. Kim studied dance at Florida State University and the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, and studied acting at the Terry Knickerbocker Studio. She loves dim sum, walking in the woods, and her black cat Hermes. Kim is Chinese-Sicilian-American and grew up in Southern California and West Virginia. www.kimsavarino.com

Kimiko tanabe

Kimiko Tanabe (she/her) is a fourth-generation Japanese American artist. She explores the mediums of performance art, dance, writing, origami and paper, and is in a committed partnership with her .38 Muji pen. She is forever fascinated with Japanese folklore and as a lover of literature she finds herself making important life decisions under the eyes and influence of fiction. Her work combines her background in contemporary dance with her literary tendencies to create surreal performance art that is both joyful and haunting, and that gives platform and power to the Asian-American emotional experience. For Kimiko, art is intimate and inexact. Kimiko graduated from Colorado College with a degree in Creative Writing and Dance in 2016. She is a BAX Space Grant Recipient (2022), Gallim Moving Artist Resident (2022), Artist in Resident at The Floor (2021), and Fresh Ground Pepper Play Ground Play Group Residency Cohort Member (2021). She currently performs with glenn potter-takata and Morgaine DeLeonardis and has performed with marion spencer, Kizuna Dance, Seymour::Dance Collective, Lisa Fagan and Hannah Mitchell, HIJACK, Nial Ibragimov, Shawn Womack, Patrizia Herminjard, and Kristi Cole & Guests.

Meghann trago

Meghann Trago is a Chinese American freelance dance artist, performer, and arts administrator residing in Brooklyn, NY. A Bard College alumna, she holds degrees in both dance and economics. A pandemic knitter, Leo, and Asian femme. She approaches each process, each day, task, creation with a lens that interrogates the complexities and messiness of her identity, from then to now, from there to here. Being an East Asian/Asian-American/East-SoutheastAsian/Chinese/Chinese-American/Chinese-?/descendent. As an artist she has had the pleasure to work/perform/be in process with Michelle Ellsworth, Soulemayne Badolo, Marjani Forte-Saunders, Abby Z and The New Utility, Mia Martelli, Marion Spencer, and Jessie Young, among others.

catherine galasso

Catherine Galasso is an independent choreographer and director based in Brooklyn, NY. Her interdisciplinary dance works have been presented by venues in the US such as Danspace Project, La MaMa, SFMoMA, and MoCA Santa Barbara, and internationally at Bibliotheque National in Paris, France; Skena UP in Pristina, Kosovo; and Zona D Studio in Bucharest, Romania. In addition, she creates original performance works for alternative spaces such as underground bank vaults, apple orchards, decaying 4-story homes, and grand marble staircases. Galasso’s work has been supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, Headlands Center, Kaatsbaan and ODC Theater in San Francisco, among others. She also works as a choreographer for theater & opera, creating dances for the US premiere of The Miracle of Heliane (dir Christian Rath, 2019 Bard SummerScape), for the internationally touring interactive theater troupe TPO of Italy (COLORS, dir Davide Venturini, 2019 Brooklyn Academy of Music). More info at catherinegalasso.org

Karen Boyer designs and builds costumes in NYC. She has collaborated on a number of pieces with Catherine Galasso and is thrilled to be a part of City of Wom_n! Past and recent collaborators include choreographers Faye Driscoll, Sidra Bell, nicHi douglas, Sarah Dahnke, Katy Pyle, and Sunny Hitt; theater makers the New Wild, Object Collection, harunalee, Little Lord, Pan Asian Rep, MetaPhysEd, and Target Margin Theater. karenrachelboyer.com

Emma Rose Brown (b. 1991) is a Queens-based performer, multidisciplinary artist, and oral historian working in the field of dance. Emma is the Archives Director of the Community Library of Voice and Sound in Hudson, NY and the Oral History Manager of Our Steps, Our Stories, an Irish Dance Legacy. From 2016-2023, she assisted in the production of the Dance Oral History Project at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Emma is a three time SU CASA artist-in-residence through Queens Council on the Arts where she's taught experimental documentary arts to older adults. Emma has presented original work at DOC NYC, Atlantic Center for the Arts, GIBNEY, Movement Research, New York Live Arts, and The School of Making Thinking. In November 2022, she performed in Mina Nishimura’s work Mapping the forest in search of the opposite term for exorcist at Danspace Project. Emma is an MFA candidate in Integrated Media Art at Hunter College and recently received the 2023 Queens Art Fund to develop her latest multi channel installation project.

Idea (ee-day-ah) Reid is a 19 year old student, dancer and environmental activist from Staten Island, NY. She graduated from the Professional Performing Arts High School and received her dance education from Staten Island Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Manhattan Youth Ballet. She is currently studying at Barnard College as a dance and psychology major. There, she has performed works by Christopher Rudd, Yoshito Sakuraba, Norbert de La Cruz III and Chanel DaSilva. In addition, Reid is an active collaborator and former intern with the Climate Museum, and has spoken at rallies, panels and symposiums fighting for NYC climate policies. She recently became a part of Staten Island’s Environmental Justice Coalition. She hopes to bring attention to the problems facing Staten Island’s waterfront, and convey her passion for people and the earth through art.

Christina Tang (she/her) is a lighting designer and multimedia art maker based in New York City. She is a frequent collaborator on new works for theater and dance. Recent credits include: The Singularity Play (Harvard Theatre, Dance, Media), we are continuous (Geva Theater), bloom bloom pow (Dead Horse Productions); Hart Island (Mason Holdings); Preparedness (The Bushwick Starr); ._SUITABLE_FOR.[EXE]CUTION (Shawné Michaelain Holloway, PSNY). Her work TRAFFIC premiered in The Exponential Festival in 2021 and was described by The New York Times as "like a puckish re-enactment (with a soupçon of Battleship visuals) of Jean-Luc Godard’s 'Weekend.'" She is a 2021 recipient of Opera America's Robert L.B. Tobin Director-Designer Prize. christinaftang.com

All photos by Victoria Sendra, except where noted. Lighting by Christina Tang, costumes by Karen Boyer.

SUPPORT

CITY OF WOM_N: HARBOR is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. CITY OF WOM_N the series has also received support from the Guild Hall of East Hampton: William P. Rayner Artist-in-Residence Program, from Dance in Process at Gibney, and from the PASS Residency Program at Snug Harbor.

EARLIER ITERATIONS OF CITY OF WOM_N

In March of 2022, we presented a rough sketch of an evening-length "proof of concept" for CITY OF WOM_N, with scenes built around movement and monologues based on 12 different historical women of New York City. The sketch was developed with and performed by a core group of collaborators: Martita Abril, Antonia Carlson, Indah Mariana, Sheryl Sutton and Saori Tsukada. jess pretty was also influential in the process in early 2020, along with Greer Dworman, mae may, and Anna Adams Stark. These collaborators played a critical roles in the initial research and development of the CITY OF WOM_N series, through our first residencies at Gibney, Snug Harbor and Guild Hall in 2020, 2021 & 2022. The proof of concept for CITY OF WOM_N was built with and around them; several continue to remain involved as advisors. We hope to present this prologue chapter of CITY OF WOM_N in 2024.

Photos of Guild Hall William P. Raynor Residency showing by Jessica Dalene. Video stills by Joe Brondo.