Photo by Ian Douglas

ABOUT

FOLK INCEST is an evening length work. Five women sit, stand, walk, and speak—interrogating the relevance of abstraction via seemingly unpresentable content including the holocaust, sexual trauma, and fetishization of young girls. They are simultaneously creating a rape colony in the woods with tiny gnome men made in petri dishes, listening to Joan Baez, watching John Waters’ film Cry Baby, and performing an anti-rape chant from a highway upstate. As various pop cultural references, genres, and bodily traumas compress into each other the work’s biting humor offers catharsis, simultaneously taking down and making a case for abstraction.

Premiered at Abrons Arts Center

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

CREDITS

Choreographed, Written, and Directed: Juliana F. May
Songs and Lyrics: Juliana F. May with text contributions by Leslie Cuyjet, Tess Dworman, Lucy Kaminsky, Molly Poerstel, Rebecca Wender
Performers: Leslie Cuyjet, Tess Dworman, Lucy Kaminsky, Molly Poerstel, and Rebecca Wender
Sound Design: Tatyana Tenenbaum
Lighting Design: Madeline Best
Costume Styling: Mariana Valencia
Dramaturgical Support: Ita Segev

Juliana May researched, developed and honed FOLK INCEST with financial, administrative and residency support from the Dance in Process program at Gibney Dance with funds provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as a space grant from BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange with support from the New York State Council on the Arts, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additionally, the development of ‘Folk Incest’ was made possible in part by the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University, and grants from the Jerome Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016. Folk Incest was created with support from the Abrons Arts Center through the Abrons AIRspace Residency Program, and individual support from our Leadership Circle donors including Amy Hass, Phoebe McBee, the McGue Millhiser Trust, Rachel Norton, Ory Slonim, Jackie and Victor Sprenger, and Sharon Teitlebaum.

PRESS

Six of their sex: female dancemakers at ImPulsTanz 2019
Claire Lefèvre, Springback Magazine
“It is rare to watch works about trauma in general, and women’s sexual traumas in particular, that transcend pathos and transpose this violent experience into a creative space where irony and lightness can also appear. But what Folk Incest mirrors with absolute brilliance is the unfiltered complexity of traumatic experiences, and the way distressing memories are not set in stone but have a dynamic life of their own. May and her cast leave you shaken to the core, not because of their raw vulnerability – although that is there – but also because they manage to shift the discourse on a topic that too often is either grossly simplified or disturbingly romanticised.”

A Dance of the Unspeakable
Siobhan Burke, The New York Times
“…Ms. May, 38, has set out to grapple with what she calls “seemingly unrepresentable” material; that is, to find ways to speak about the unspeakable. While trauma has been a recurring theme in her work, she said she has never before confronted it so concretely. “I’m looking at my own sexual trauma, and at intergenerational trauma as a Jew,” she said at a restaurant in the Lower East Side. Her mother’s parents, she said, fled from the Holocaust; their parents died in Europe. In particular, she has been contemplating what it means to romanticize or find arousal in traumatic events, whether personal, historical or both….Some of it’s about the fantasy of the trauma, which is also a way of dealing with or mastering the trauma,” she said.”

Fractured Dialogues: Juliana May’s Folk Incest
Rennie McDougall, The Brooklyn Rail
“Juliana May’s performances negotiate the complexities of trauma. Within the choreographies themselves, however, May often decentralizes trauma and catharsis instead of overtly addressing them; aggression simmers underneath the dance, occasionally surfacing before giving way to the work’s other occupations.”

"Folk Incest": a new Juliana F. May ensemble at Abrons
Eva Ya Asantewaa, InfiniteBody
“…I rapidly became so engrossed in what I heard that I don't even recall if she was really glancing at the paper. Poerstel's monologue turned into a tour de force utilizing dexterous mental and vocal ability, beginning with stammering and sputtering, spinning out into something that...oh, I don't know...maybe an exorcist should be brought in to handle. Secrets blurted, profanities barked, surfaces erupting with the long-buried dead. Searing. Scorching. It felt of the moment.”

In Performance: Juliana F. May, Folk Incest (American Realness)
Rachel Karp, Contemporary Performance
“It’s a simple statement that should be more than obvious with regards to the likes of sexual trauma, but of course it isn’t, and Juliana F. May’s Folk Incest helps to remind of that.”

IMPRESSIONS: Juliana F. May’s “Folk Incest” at Abrons Arts Center
Erin Bomboy, The Dance Enthusiast
“Folk Incest unpacks the aftermath of a thousand hammers dropped, the piece gushing like an infected, untreated wound. It exposes and releases the trauma of the collective female experience where the pain throbs so acutely that the only sane artistic response is insanity, absurdity, and bawdiness.”