THEATERLAB PRESENTS
TEST TESTIMONY
OF THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS
conceived and directed by Yoshiko Chuma
featuring Wendy Perron as its witness.
In Test Testimony of The School of Hard Knocks, Yoshiko Chuma will present a single witness alongside artworks and video footage, while asking a fundamental question: Who is this witness?
Art feels like something that accompanies us through life. An artwork can trouble us, even torment us, until we eventually find some kind of resolution.
Through the witness, this strange presence—something deeply connected to the mystery of being human—is brought into view.
The School of Hard Knocks is an award-winning collaborative company of choreographers, dancers, actors, singers, musicians, designers, and visual artists working under Yoshiko Chuma’s artistic direction. Founded in 1980, the company takes its name from its first production, a collaboration among Chuma, filmmaker Jacob Burckhardt, and musician Alvin Curran, presented at the 1980 Venice film festival.
Since its founding, more than 3,000 artists have performed with The School of Hard Knocks in works ranging from theatrical dance concerts to street performances, parades, large-scale spectacles, and intimate Living Room Projects, Chuma’s signature program.
The company creates and performs new work during its annual New York season and tours throughout the United States, Asia, and Europe, with a particular focus on Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The School of Hard Knocks is committed to offering young dancers international exposure and opportunities.
PERFORMANCES
Saturday, August 22nd @ 7:30pm
Approximately 90 mins (no intermission)
TICKETS
Please make your purchase according your needs.
MEET THE ARTISTS
Cutting-edge choreographer, director, instigator, movement explorer, and performer Yoshiko Chuma continues a lifetime obsession with the mythology of danger. Landing in New York in 1976, Chuma settled in lower Manhattan, then labeled a dangerous place. Devoid of the culture and inflation you see now, Yoshiko managed to begin her career in lower Manhattan, spanning an impressive 45-year career to date. Creating over 100’s productions, including company works, commissions, and site-specific events, Chuma constantly challenges the notion of performance for both audience and participants. Crossing physical and metaphorical borders, Chuma has placed herself in danger’s way for the sake of art. She has crossed the border between East and Central Europe in the early 80s to 90s, the border to Palestine for over 10 years since 2005, the border between Albania and Kosovo in 2007, the border to Afghanistan in 2014, and the border to Maracaibo, Venezuela in 2014, among many more. Forbidden realms for some but centers of creation for Chuma, these visits challenge preconceived ideas of danger and have brought about some of the most beautiful experiences. Chuma intentionally confuses documentation with history, recreating segments from her documented events. She never gives herself boundaries or lets them interfere with her work. Making art is not her intention at all; all her efforts are oriented toward giving performances that have never been seen before. Having received no formal dance training, she pursues spontaneous and experimental techniques and methods of construction. Her creative process begins with a single movement (dance) or abstract image conveyed to her filmmaking pattern. She once presented a crumpled piece of drawing to her team and requested a single movement that expressed similar qualities. Project after project, year after year, she upends conventional notions of dance and disrupts accepted characteristics of performance. Her performances not only stand apart from the genealogy of dance but also resist definition and confound interpretation – endless peripheral borders.
Wendy Perron is a dancer/choreographer turned writer/editor/scholar. She trained equally in modern dance and ballet before earning a BA from Bennington College and an MA from SUNY Empire State College. She danced with the Trisha Brown Company in the 1970s and choreographed more than 40 works for her own group, which received commissions from Lincoln Center Festival, the Joyce Theater, Jacob’s Pillow, and the Danspace Project. Perron has taught at Bennington, Princeton, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and the Conservatory at SUNY Purchase, and she has often adjudicated for ballet and choreography competitions. In the early 1990s she served as associate director of Jacob’s Pillow, where she conceived and co-directed an international intensive in improvisation. She was the editor in chief of Dance Magazine from 2004 to 2013, and has also written for the New York Times, the Village Voice, vanityfair.com, and journals in Europe and China. An authority on Judson Dance Theater and postmodern dance, Perron has lectured across the country and in Russia and China. In 2011 she was the first dance artist to be inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts’ Hall of Fame. Her second book, The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance, 1970-1975, met with acclaim when it was published in 2020. She has recently performed with Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks in downtown venues. Her new online series, “Unsung Heroes of Dance History,” presents research on dance artists outside the “canon.” She has been on the Juilliard faculty since 2019.
COVID-19 policy: In guidance with the city and state COVID-19 policies, we will no longer be requiring masks, but strongly recommend them.