With a curatorial methodology that adopts associative thinking, Abrons invites Elena Rose Light (in collaboration with Evelyn Lillian Sánchez Narvaez) to begin the link in a chain of shared evening presentations. Light invited Pallavi Sen, who invited Bully Fae Collins. Over three nights in September, Light, Sen, and Collins share new work with each other and with their respective communities. Through dance, visual art, and music, their practices traverse aggression in the American settler colony, South Asian aesthetics, and the persona of the queer troublemaker. Their constellation represents the digital and live encounters—Instagram feeds, creative residencies, backyard parties—linking artists and ideas in 2018.

By Association is a platform for artists to collectively experiment with the practice of associative thinking. An artist is invited to be the “instigatory link” in a chain of thought, who then invites another artist whose practice informs and/or challenges their line of inquiry. This artist then invites another artist, and so the pattern continues. For three nights, the chain fuses and breaks in the form of shared evening presentations that put artists in creative discourse with one another across artistic disciplines.

Elena Rose Light is a choreographer and performer based in Brooklyn. Her performances warp embodied social and cultural phenomena to envision alternative modes of being and doing. She has presented her work at Gibney Dance, Center for Performance Research, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Movement Research at Judson Church, and the Yale University Art Gallery, among other venues. Elena has been an artist in residence at Chez Bushwick, The School of Making Thinking, and Earthdance. She was a 2016 danceWEB scholar at ImPulsTanz, a 2016 Dance Institute for Leadership Training mentee, a 2016-17 LANDING participant with Miguel Gutierrez, and a 2017 EMERGENYC fellow at the NYU Hemispheric Institute. Elena has also performed in the work of Bouchra Ouizguen, Tino Sehgal, Asad Raza, Bruno Isakovic, and Maya Ciarrocchi and Kris Grey. She received a BA with honors in French and art history from Yale University. For By Association, Light collaborates with performer/maker Evelyn Lilian Sánchez Narvaez in a dance that enacts the interpersonal dynamics of race and class difference. Bully Fae Collins is a performance artist utilizing scripts, song writing, prop making, and movement, to braid together fictional and personal worlds in fragmented soloperformance works. Their interdisciplinary methodology uses familiar entertainment tropes, like stand-up comedy or pop music, as jumping off points for creating uncanny abstractions and trickery. They received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore MD. Based in Los Angeles since 2015, Bully has exhibited solo performances at PAM Residencies, REDCAT's Studio, Bootleg Theatre, Aur House, and Coaxial.Pallavi Sen is from Bombay, India. She works with installation, printmaking, textiles, Instagram, and intuitive movement. Current interests include inner lives of birds and animals, South Asian costumes, domestic architecture, rituals, altars, deities, skate/bro culture, style, pattern history, toxic masculinity, friendship + love, her future lover, farming and the artist as farmer, work spaces, work tables, eco-feminism, love poems, the gates to Indian homes, walking, and cooking deliberately. She supports her work + New York rent through various jobs, projects, spaces, residencies, and schools.

By Association: Elena Rose Light, Pallavi Sen, Bully Fae Collins is commissioned by Abrons Arts Center with generous grants from the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the Harkness Foundation for Dance, the Jerome Foundation, the Jerome Robbins Foundation, the Scherman Foundation, 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 in partnership with the City Council. This season was also made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.

Image: Malcolm-x Betts