Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith: Gloria
May 20–22, 2021
Gloria is a feminist work that marks the continuation of Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith’s fifteen-year choreographic partnership. Together, they use dance to break down patriarchal constructs of female degradation by directly engaging with physical objectification. Lieber and Smith portray recognizable tropes of female objectification, only to deconstruct and represent these forms to offer a different narrative, one that is sculpted by their bodies, a deeply understood femininity, and friendship. In an age of grief, Gloria is an explicit testimony of women about resistance and the glory of survival.
This work features design by James Lo and Lighting Design by Thomas Dunn.
ABOUT
Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith have been making dances in New York since 2006. Their process recontextualizes sexual trauma through body-based methods of abstraction, filtration through each other, imaginative landscape building, and dissociation. Works include: Body Comes Apart (New York Live Arts 2019, Documented by The New York Public Library for Performing Arts Jerome Robbins Dance Division); Basketball (PS122 and Baryshnikov Arts Center for COIL 2017); Rude World (PS122 and The Chocolate Factory Theater for COIL 2015); Tulip (Roulette, 2013; Judson Now at Danspace Project, 2012); Beautiful Bone (The Chocolate Factory Theater, 2012). They have received a multitude of residencies and awards including 2020 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence; 2019 Baryshnikov Arts Center BACSpace Residency; 2018 Bessie Schonberg Fellows at The Yard; and 2018 DiP Residency Artists at Gibney, featured as one of Alastair Macaulay’s “Best Dance of 2017” in The New York Times for Basketball; and 2013 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award Nominee for Emerging Choreographer.
FUNDING
Gloria is commissioned by the Abrons Arts Center through the Performance AIRspace Residency, which is supported by the Jerome Foundation. The 2020-2021 Season at Abrons Arts Center is supported, in part, by generous grants from the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the Harkness Foundation for Dance, the Jerome Foundation, the Scherman Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, the Jerome Robbins Foundation, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, and other generous Henry Street Settlement funders. This program is also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Image credit: Maria Baranova