Carriage is a site-responsive performance created by Matty Davis and Ben Gould that radically explores control and empathy, motored in part by the raw energy of Gould’s Tourette Syndrome.
This performance is informed by evolving senses of the body—injury, trauma, healing, and growth—and offers a unique opportunity to create a work that draws from the variance of Davis and Gould’s distinct physicalities. The result is an intense, viscerally and sonically charged experience, where empathy is a physical tool, resistance offers stability, and we are all cast out into a space that levels us, brings us real fear, awakening, new vocabularies and physical structures.
In collaboration with curator/producer Jade Thacker, the work will be shared at various venues and locations throughout the United States, responding to and recomposing itself according to the various demands and nuances of the light, sonic quality, surface, kinesthetic possibility, and historical context unique to each site. The work continuously evolves.
2018 U.S. Tour Dates
March 29: Queens, NY at Queenslab, 7:00PM
March 31: Brooklyn, NY, at The Roof, 7:00PM
May 3: Headlands, San Francisco, CA at Battery Mendell, 6:00PM
May 4: Oakland, CA at Creative Growth, 7:00PM
May 6: Los Angeles, CA at Human Resources, 7:00PM
June 9: Detroit, MI at Lightbox, time TBC
Additional dates to be announced.
“One of the most profound experiences in contemporary performance. Frustration, desolation, sadness and love are embodied in a wide-ranging programmatic structure both rawly virtuosic and tastefully sparse. Truly stunning physicalities, reminiscent of the sculpture of Henry Moore and Anthony Caro, create moments of austere isolation that are subsumed into a vital emotional unity.”
–– Clifford Allen, Director of Archives, Watermill Center, NYC
"The performance is visually stunning. The language of movement between Matty and Ben is uncannily harmonic, touching, and embodies and expands our notion of empathy."
–– Holly Shen, Director and Curator of Visual Arts, BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music)
Carriage has been workshopped in New York City at Judson Church, the Watermill Center, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Philadelphia School, and Queenslab. It was supported through a residency at the Kickstarter Headquarters in NYC, and has received support from a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.
Matty Davis is an artist from Pittsburgh, PA, where his father’s plane crashed and his grandfather worked for decades in the steel mills. Described by the New Yorker as “fearless,” he has been noted for his combination of relentless, imaginative physicality and intimacy. Davis is invested in the body as a network of energy systems and architectures that can be activated and transformed through action, sparking visceral transformation and mining somatic memory. His multi-disciplinary practice yields live performances, films, objects, drawings, and photographs. In 2012, he co-founded BOOMERANG, a performance project based in New York City, and has performed works by or with David Hallberg, Gudio van der Werve, Andy de Groat, and Tino Sehgal. His work has been presented by the Art Institute of Chicago, Steppenwolf Theater, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Judson Church, the 92nd St. Y, the Watermill Center, Dixon Place, Danspace Project, and the Arts Arena in Paris, and the Max Ernst Museum, among others. He was the recipient of a 2016 Visual Arts Fellowship from the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and has recently been an artist-in-residence at the Watermill Center, Queenslab, and Kickstarter’s HQ in Brooklyn. Davis teaches at colleges and schools throughout the US, including New York University, Columbia College, Oberlin College, Muhlenberg College, Kenyon College, the Professional Performing Arts High School in New York, and the Philadelphia School. More information is available at www.mattydavis.net
Ben Gould is an artist currently living and working in New York City. After being diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome, Gould’s studio practice has transformed to harbor a new investment in the body, exploring limits, resistance, and the loss of control. Grounded in performance, his multidisciplinary practice is built upon collaboration, intimacy, and urgency - cultivated by a deep interest in how energy is directed, rerouted, transformed and transferred. His condition has become an engine for movement-based performance work that is in search of stabilization, and driven by an evolving practice of energetic restraint and release. Within a growing mythos, a space for fantasy and freedom is created for the corresponding videos, images, and objects that emerge from this process. Gould has performed site-specific works across the country, from varied geographies to institutional spaces - leading to solo exhibitions at Plug Projects in Kansas City and Ballroom Projects in Chicago, and collaborations with musicians, rock climbers, singers, and designers. Gould has apprenticed with master craftsmen in California, was a 2015 Ox-Bow Fellow, a 2017 Kickstarter Artist in Residence, and Queenslab Space Grant recipient in 2018. He was born in Grass Valley, California in 1993 and was raised there, in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains, next to a decommissioned gold mine and a river. Most recently he has performed and shown new works in Kansas City, San Antonio, Miami, Los Angeles, and at the Watermill Center, Judson Church, and Queenslab in New York. More information is available at www.bengould.net
Clothing by Gabriella Lacza
Produced by Jade Thacker