Help Bring Intimacy for the Apocalypse to NYC

Hi everyone, I am Emily Barasch, i'm a choreographer, educator, intimacy coordinator, and curator based in Los Angeles. I engage with community building and performance making as interrelated political activation strategies, positioning choreography as both a survival strategy and a method for change. My work is an exercise in communal resiliency, centering bodies and their inter-relational capacities to imagine queer, anti-capitalist futures that resist and transform dominant logics of fixed identity and linear time. Through durational scores and the manipulation of repetitive physical gestures and vocal utterances, I generates alternative frameworks for language, identity, and time, offering blueprints for the future. I am asking for your support in making my New York evening length premiere of Intimacy for the Apocalypse this summer at Kestrels to be performed with Brendan Drake, Miya Shaffer, and myself.

With this fundraiser, I am humbly asking for community support in raising $6,000 - a portion of the total amount necessary to bring this work to fruition. Funds will go directly towards paying dancers' performance fees and rehearsal costs, rehearsal space, costumes, materials, lighting designer, and documentation. Making work is hard and making work in the conditions of arts defunding is even harder. As these institutions and funding sources continue to crumble, community support becomes even more vital for the creation and sustainability of art creation and presentation.

MY COMMITMENT TO COMMUNITY BUILDING THROUGH PERFORMANCE

For the last four years, I have self produced, curated, and funded the Los Angeles based performance platform, FIRST DRAFT, a series showcasing works-in-

progress by four curated local choreographers. The series highlights risk-taking projects that push the boundaries of dominant social orders and cultivate self-directed research practices.

The state of performance-making often isolates artists, forcing them into individualistic cycles of creation, development, and production. FIRST DRAFT intervenes in this isolating capitalist system by mobilizing local artists' assets for resource-sharing and mutual support. FIRST DRAFT aims to reimagine performance as a site of shared artistic growth, where artists can actively participate in building sustainable creative practices together. FIRST DRAFT provides a platform for sharing rigorous artistic research, advocates for equitable models of artistic development, and contributes to the Los Angeles' performance landscape.

I piloted this program out of a desire to cultivate deeper artistic connections and opportunities outside of institutional frameworks. I am committed to continuing to support local artists and performance makers through this community initiative I now turn to my community to support my artistic work, in the spirit of collectivity over competition.

ABOUT INTIMACY FOR THE APOCALYPSE

In Intimacy For the Apocalypse an unstable structure threatens collapse as three performers complete tuning and task based scores to reorient the materials based on co-constituted emergent logics in an attempt to find stability and support. This work is an exercise in communal resiliency, examining new relational practices for how moving bodies and their environments can resist and transform dominant logics out of collapse, giving way to intra-dependent speculative futures. This practice mobilizes the interstitial spaces between communal and structural destruction--disorientation--tuning--assemblage--living...

Drawing on my work as an intimacy coordinator, I’ve been thinking a lot

about consent, boundaries, and intimacy for/during/in/after the apocalypse and what an entangled survival might look like. For me, intimacy is an ongoing process of

relational negotiating.

What can you give?

Where can you support?

How do you ask for what you need?

What might a politics of solidarity look like that allows for conflicting needs/desires/limits?

There is a lot of talk these days about community and care and solidarity. This project is my attempt at actualizing these concepts and experimenting with what this process of negotiation might look like in and through our bodies. Together in space, in tension, in support, in conflict, in rupture, in uncovering. Finding a way to be and

build together before/in/after the apocalypse.

Cheers to more community, art building, and performance in/during/through the Apocalypse. Anything helps, thank you!