Ariel Speedwagon
Ariel Speedwagon is a performance and video artist in New York City. Trained as a modern dancer, her inherently interdisciplinary work has taken many forms — interactive sculpture, video art, modern dance and dance theater, drag performance and burlesque, collective mapmaking, and clowning. She is always interested in the intersections of storytelling, participatory environments, magic, and democratizing knowledge. As Professor Speedwagon, she has lectured on the origins of “Happy Birthday,” the queer history of Chanukkah, and lez film.
Her one woman show, The Hand Ball, will premiere at Dixon Place as part of the HOT!fest this August.
Performance: JFREJ/Workmen’s Circle Purimshpil (New York, 2007-2010); HEY QUEEN! (New York, 2009); Rufflebutt, Dixon Place HOT! Festival (2008); Boston Femme Show (2008); Big Moves New York (2006-2008); Montreal International Fringe Festival 2007 Spirit of the Fringe Award (with Big Moves Boston); Ladyfest Seattle (2005); Velocity Dance Center Bridge Project (Seattle, 2005). Former Miss Jew-S-A 5768. BA, Dance and Creative Writing, University of Washington, 2003.
Video: Proteus Gowanus, Transport II (New York, 2010); 25CPW, Windows and Mirrors (New York, 2010); JFREJ/Workmen’s Circle Purimshpil (New York, 2008-2010); I Love Gaza Festival (New York, 2009); Homo-A-Gogo (San Francisco, 2009).
Her website is: http://www.arielspeedwagon.com.
Daniel Lang/Levitsky
Daniel Lang/Levitsky is a puppeteer and rabble-rouser based in New York City. Began making performances with objects and movement in the mid-1990s and hasn’t stopped since: tabletop puppetry; giant-scale visual spectacles; dance parties; direct actions.
Always more interested in working in collaborations and in public places; can’t stop picking things up on the street and making other things out of them; never figured out how to make art for art’s sake. Third generation radical; second generation queer; just another enthusiastically secular, predictably bookish, oysterlisher gendertreyf mischling who gets off on long strings of identity terms. Serves on the Board of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, and writes other people’s grants for money.
Recent work has included co-directing/designing/co-producing and performing in Between Two Worlds, or, who loved you before you were mine with Killer Sideburns/Emily Nepon, J Dellecave, Niknaz Tavakolian, Patrick Farrell and others (Dixon Place’s HOT! Festival; Red Lotus Room); costuming and technical design for Abigail Levine’s Move the House dance company (Judson Church; Aunts Roadshow; company launch performance); and many roles – since 2007 including design coordinator – in the annual Purimshpil extravaganza directed by Jenny Romaine for Jews for Racial & Economic Justice and Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter-Ring.
Current projects include: do not spare, a parlor puppetry performance which will tour Brooklyn’s living rooms in August 2010; Foretopman, a melancholy camp toy theater and light opera mashup of Billy Budd and H.M.S. Pinafore; and performing with the Rude Mechanical Orchestra’s Tactical Spectacle dance/flag/extravaganza crew.
Quito Ziegler
Quito Ziegler is a photographer and visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York.
By day, she works at the Open Society Institute‘s Documentary Photography Project as the Exhibition Producer for Moving Walls, and the Outreach Coordinator for other projects that explore the intersection of photography and human rights.
By night, she makes installations and sculptures, takes photos, plays the piano and serves on the board of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice.
After midnight, you can find her on the dance floor.
Quito received her MFA from the International Center of Photography/Bard College in 2008, where she now teaches courses on collaborating with NGOs and grant-writing.
Her website is: http://quitoziegler.wordpress.com.
