in collaboration w/ Marc Arthur

do not let them build walls
to protect us, to segregate us, to keep us from meeting.
there is no freedom in restraint
in laws to deny our human rights
break free with us, help create chocolate city

Excerpts of a 4 hour meditative performance installation in a room covered from floor to ceiling with plastic tarps in total darkness. People entering are invited to cover their body with chocolate syrup and find ways of interacting with each other. Participants engage identity through the senses; the smell of chocolate, the need to touch in order to move through the room, and sounds created. Chocolate City was also created as a social space to confront racism through body politics. Bringing to the surface race issues using the body to develop language that expresses and moves beyond living in a body politicized, used, neglected, and lost to injustice. In the dark we are all equal, confronting our own fears, our own hopes. (Performance June 4th, 2006 at Makor/Steinhardt Center of the 92nd St Y NYC)

Performed with Jack Waters, Carlo Quispe, Juan Betancurth, Dominic Cloutier, Devon Gallegos, Rios O’Leary and visitors

Flash Photographers: Sur Rodney (Sur) and Meredith Arena

Special Thanks: Sur Rodney (Sur), Jack Waters, Marc Arthur, John Lovett

MANIFESTO

MAKE ART
about mixing and mingling, sharing experiences, and interactions between people, a social creation, seeing and watching something created.

BUILD
upon audience participation.

PARTICIPATE
in the process, joining, and helping to build up a form and language with which to engage, discuss, and create relationships.

EXPERIENCE ART
that has no lines delineating boundaries, as with life. that will slowly erase the distinctions of boundaries, of borders, of identities.

CREATE AN EXPERIENCE
encouraging cross mixing between people and places and journeys. that will foam and foment with the tides. something fluid, something we take with us, something we carry inside–where art and life collide in new environments, new spaces.

OBSERVE
your own inner limits, and push against the boundaries of our own bodies.

RELEASE
negative energies so that something positive can happen.

ENCOURAGE
participants to break free, thereby bringing out their own emotions into another space and state of awakening, realization, and change.