Press

“…like a poem come to life.”
Michelle Vellucci, Flavorwire
>full article(PDF)

" Forget the safety of distance; this is the palpable sensation of art – up-close and personal."
Deborah Gibroff, Encore Magazine
>full article (PDF)

"Choreographer Castro's upcoming duet takes voyeurism to a precipice.”
Lori Ortiz, Gay City News
>full article (PDF)

"Castro’s work is intellectual. Her movement is quirky; remarkably polished performances propel her unexpected stutters and awkward positions…Castro’s smart, kooky shenanigans captivate…"
Chris Dohse, The Village Voice

"Yanira Castro has found an individual voice."
Jennifer Dunning, The New York Times

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a canary torsi creates site-adaptable dance projects within visual and audio environments. Established in 2009 by New York director/choreographer Yanira Castro, a canary torsi invites audiences to engage in scenarios that are anchored around live performance and extend into other media and online platforms. These multidisciplinary arts collaborations incorporate unconventional sites and transform traditional venues. Ranging from formalist movement and immersive audio installations to fictional Twitter feeds and photographic narratives, Castro’s collaborations plunder behavior, gesture, text and sound from a multitude of source: fiction, film, photography to engage participants in an immediate, personal encounter with the work.

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Yanira Castro Biography

Yanira Castro is a Puerto Rican born and Brooklyn-based director/choreographer. She collaborates with performers and designers on individual projects under the name, a canary torsi. Together with her collaborators, she creates hybrid performance works that integrate movement, installation, music, and text. Over the past eight years, Castro has earned a reputation for creatively rethinking an audience’s perceptual and sensorial experience of a performance work. Michelle Vellucci of Flavorwire: “Castro specializes in work that feels more like a personal encounter than a performance, creating environments that don’t allow audience members the option of viewing from a safe distance.”

Recognized by awards from NEFA’s National Dance Project, Jerome Foundation, MAP Fund, NYFA’s BUILD, AMC’s Live Music for Dance, Trust for Mutual Understanding, USArtists International, and LMCC’s Swing Space program, among others: Castro has been the recipient of fellowships from Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography and Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. She is an alumnus of Sugar Salon, a program of Williamsburg Art neXus in partnership with the Dance Department of Barnard College, and was artist-in-residence in Bacau, Romania through Artist Ne(s)t. Yanira received her B.A. in Theater & Dance and Literature from Amherst College.

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Repertory

The People to Come (work in progress)

The People to Come is the tentative title for a new performance installation conceived and directed by choreographer Yanira Castro in collaboration with sound installation artist Stephan Moore, lighting and installation designer Kathy Couch, and five male dancers. It is a solo choreographed by Castro and radically altered each night by the performers from material contributed by the communities surrounding the performance site and the audience attending the performances. Through a series of simple questions and assignments that audience members are asked to answer during the performance and that community members respond to on a dedicated website—the audience influences the dance.

In performance, the dancers will utilize these responses to build a new solo, using the original dance from Castro as a skeleton. The audience witnesses the individual choices made in recreating the solo, and how the material from the community/audience transforms how they see the dance. Presented as a duet: two 10’ x 10’ platforms standing side-by-side serve as “staging areas”: on one platform one dancer develops their new solo speaking into a microphone as they work, while on the other platform another dancer performs their solo.

The People to Come exposes the process of making a dance, making transparent how the performers work and how the choreographer develops structure. The piece continues Castro’s long-standing explorations of how work involves audiences and perhaps most significantly, pushes forward the question of what it means to be “live” in live performance: how the presence of each person in the room can change the outcome of the work, creating an environment where no one knows the final outcome including the choreographer and performers. The People to Come is the collision of material from audiences and community members with choreographic material in real-time. It is a collage of portraits (yours, your neighbors, the audience). Mundane or sublime, prosaic or virtuosic, the drama is the effort of five dancers making it in front of you and the chance that you may recognize yourself.

Paradis

Paradis is a performance and audio installation with live piano performed outdoors at twilight. Inspired by the final section of Jean-Luc Godard's 2004 film, Notre Musique, Paradis continues Castro's exploration of the space between the performer and audience member: the tension in the simultaneous experience of distance and intimacy inherent in the live performed moment.

“At a certain point, the dancers began to sing...Was it before or after they ran away, disappearing into the night, that Dauphinais invited us to sing along? Either way, we were left alone to carry on the tune--continue the performance without the performers, interpret the message without the messengers, and do what we would with the weight of that responsibility. We kept on singing, for a while at least. Whatever this strange paradise was, far removed from civilization, it now belonged to us as much as them.”
- Siobhan Burke, Dance Magazine Blog

Wilderness

Wilderness is a site-adaptable performance installation in which the audience and performers occupy a field of black rubber mulch containing all elements of the piece: seating, piano, crew. A stark emotional solo for an older man begins the piece and is then translated to abstract, technical movement for four dancers. The audience provides the structure for the choreography and sound: their movement determines a set of performance rules for the dancers and is captured by microphones to compose a musical score for piano. Wilderness will have a videogame component created by game designer and artist Jason Rohrer. >full description

Dark Horse/Black Forest- 45 minutes

Dark Horse/Black Forest is intensely performed love story presented in the most intimate space, a bathroom. Set in public bathrooms or an individual’s private bathroom, the audience is privy to an emotional and private exchange between a man and a woman that ends in a formal, sensual ballet… pristine and stark.

Dark Horse/Black Forest expands Yanira Castro's exploration of audience environments: how an observer and a performer connect to the work, how they participate, how a space influences, and how the performance addresses this meeting place. The performers and audience inhabit the bathroom together. There are no theatrical divisions, allowing the audiences close proximity to the action. The performers’ emotional interactions are palpable and evolving right next to you throughout the performance. The experience is not one of distance, of an image framed, but of action and breath living and working beside and around you.

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