Artist Conversation | Die No Die (Arkansas)
Join us for an artist talk by multidisciplinary artist and 2022 artist-in-residence Matty Davis, creator of Die No Die (Arkansas)—a site-responsive performance featuring a series of outdoor dance performances by six artists, connected by a procession across the Momentary campus.
This companion artist talk is the perfect gateway to learning more about Die No Die (Arkansas), the artists behind it, and how this unique work will play out across the Momentary. We’ll meet outside for drinks and snacks at the RØDE Bar beginning at 5:30 p.m., then head into the RØDE House at 6 p.m. for the main event. The night’s conversation will be moderated by Chloé Cooper Jones and will include the artist, Matty Davis, in conversation with project contributors, dancer Karen Castleman and environmental educator Yannik Dwyer.
Following the discussion and artist Q&A, you’re invited to head up to the Tower Bar to continue the conversation and see the performance site from a bird’s eye view.
For the curious and adventurous, the athlete, the environmentalist, the local or visitor, for a long time lover of performance and dance or a newcomer to the forms, Die No Die (Arkansas) is a beautiful project created by and for the people and the land of Northwest Arkansas.
See you there!
Free, no tickets required.
ABOUT DIE NO DIE (ARKANSAS)
Situated outdoors at night and traversing approximately 800 meters throughout the Momentary campus, Die No Die is a performance structured in the spirit of a shooting star—bursting into view, scintillating, to be lunged after, beheld, or lost. The intensity of its arrival initiates idiosyncratic choreographies designed to “send the heart deeper,” as both performer(s) and audience negotiate the contours of meaning, connection, and control.
One after another, in linear succession, each performer comes crashing into space, initiating an embodied journey through specific challenges, demands, and freedoms. Each signals to the next through the felt beat of their hearts.
Like maps are used to familiarize a person with the terrain, routes, and possibilities of a geography or place, Die No Die involves a publication that details architectures, flora, types of ground, and qualities as they relate to the performers and the performance’s trajectory. This piece of publishing—a preparatory exchange between the artists and the audience—will be mailed in advance of the performance and is intended to initiate a relationship based on care and responsibility that is carried into the performance itself.
Die No Die features performances and contributions by Karen Castleman (AR), Matty Davis (CA), Lyle Oberman (AR/UT), Blake Worthey (AR), and Tony Orrico (IA), with a special contribution by Will Arbery (CA).
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Matty Davis
Matty Davis is an artist who uses embodied forms of risk, trust, and empathy to collaboratively explore perennial questions of mortality, desire, and how to deal with one another and survive together. His work is marked by a unique degree of responsivity, constantly churning new relationships, iconographies, methods, and materialities.
Matty was born near Pittsburgh, PA, and grew up as a multi-sport athlete, which exposed him to visceral experiences of injury, resilience, teamwork, and play that continue to influence him. While expansive in its subject matter and material outcomes—sculpture, drawing, photography, and publishing—his work predominantly manifests in performance and dance, which he values as a communal space in which to be radically present and alive.
Described as “balancing ecstatically on the edge of life and death” (Zaritt), Matty’s work has been presented throughout at the US and abroad including at the ICA Miller at Carnegie Mellon University, the Fine Arts Center at the University of Arkansas, the Art Institute of Chicago, Bozar, the Palais de Tokyo, the Max Ernst Museum, Pioneer Works, and Steppenwolf Theater, among many distinct site-specific contexts. He has been commissioned to make performances for internationally-acclaimed artists such as Hito Steyerl, but has also worked intensely with surgeons, carpenters, aviators, athletes, botanists, and activists.
He currently lives in California.
Karen Castleman
Karen Castleman is a dancer, choreographer, educator and community organizer, creating spaces for deepening the experience of dance as an art form. She enjoys problem solving and looking at the familiar in new ways. Her work is site specific and collaborative. Whether creating dance in a theater, museum, parking garage or open field, utilizing ballet, modern, popular, or pedestrian vocabularies, she welcomes viewers to make new meaning out of the most familiar subject, the body.
Following a professional career dancing with MOMIX, Hubbard Street Chicago, Rubberbandance Group, and others, Castleman has spent the past decade teaching and creating in NW Arkansas. Castleman co-founded NWA Movement Hub and Flyover Dance Collective in 2022 to present contemporary dance work and provide education opportunities for dancers, dance-makers and audiences alike.
Yannik Dwyer
Yannik Dwyer is a Northwest Arkansas Master Naturalist with a BS in horticulture from the University of Arkansas. As an environmental educator, she wants to share the peace and knowledge she’s found via gardening ecologically through which anyone can positively impact the environment even on the individual level while elucidating the intricate beauty of the more-than-human world shining through even in the most abused and neglected of landscapes.
Chloé Cooper Jones
Chloé Cooper Jones is a professor, journalist, and the author of the memoir Easy Beauty, which was named a best book of 2022 by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, TIME magazine, and was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir. She was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Feature Writing in 2020. She is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient, and a Howard Foundation Fellow. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Cynthia Post Hunt
Cynthia Post Hunt is a curator and artist based in Northwest Arkansas. A graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Cynthia is the Curator of Performance at the Momentary. She is deeply invested in the research and presentation of Live Art. Cynthia maintains a research-based performance practice. Cynthia holds a masters in curating with a thesis in artist-run practices influencing institutional spaces from the University of Aarhus in Denmark.
SPONSORS
Sponsored by LIVSN Designs.