Photo by Maria Baranova

ABOUT

Family Happiness continues May's decade-long investigation into body control and the complicated system of victimhood and perpetration. Pitting Post-Modern and Modernist choreographic strategies such as task and symbolism against pop cultural references of the 80s and 90s, this dance-text-song triptych delivers a space for culpability and catharsis.

Premiered at Abrons Arts Center. Reprised in January 2024 at The Chocolate Factory Theater.

For more information on “Family Happiness,” including availability for touring and curation, please email jfmdances@gmail.com.

CREDITS

Choreographed, Written, and Directed: Juliana F. May
Original Songs: Juliana F. May in collaboration with the performers
Performers: Leslie Cuyjet, Tess Dworman, Lucy Kaminsky, Molly Poerstel, and Kayvon Pourazar
Sound Design: Tatyana Tenenbaums
Special Musical Contributions: Lucy Kaminsky
Costume Design: Mariana Valencia
Lighting Design: Chloë Z. Brown
Dramaturgical Support: Hilary Clark
Project Manager: Shana Crawford
Stage Manager: Randi Rivera

Family Happiness is co-commissioned by Abrons Arts Center and the Chocolate Factory Theater. The development of the work was made possible in part by the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) at Florida State University and with residency support from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Dance Studio Residency Program.

PRESS

I was sitting in my seat when I saw a sensation
Amit Noy, The Brooklyn Rail
”The movements themselves excavate the inseparability of geometry and sentiment. They’re highly crafted and physically distinct, yet also possess a psychological tenor. May knows that a form is also a structure of feeling, a way of being toward the world. She stacks movements on top of each other like dinner plates to challenge ideas of behavioral coherence. Rendering emotion into a material, May’s work asks: how could anyone ever feel only one type of way? She fashions an objecthood out of the putty of interiority to remind us (following Kathy Acker) that “‘I’ is a text that is being perpetually rewritten.”

Dispassionate Traumas and Choral Dream Songs
Brian Seibert, The New York Times
“The profane text they sing is a fragmented, stream-of-consciousness poem, drawing perhaps from dreams. It touches on topics like sexual role playing, sex beaches and face eating, but also on ordinary insecurities and talking dogs — a mix of memory, sensation and fantasy. There is an “I” and a “you,” but they are unstable, an effect that’s amplified and complicated by the choral singing.”