CITY STORIES
SMASHWORKS DANCE X BENNY CRUZ
CITY STORIES is a multimedia performance inspired by the verve, challenges, and elation of living in New York City. This interdisciplinary collaboration brings together choreography and immersive video projections by Ashley McQueen, and paintings on Metropolitan Transit Authority subway maps by Benny Cruz. An episodic pastiche of emotional peaks and valleys, CITY STORIES teeters between sublimity and deluge, showing the utterly unheroic heroism of surviving in New York City’s ecosystem.
Drawing together choreography, video installation, painting, and audience participation, CITY STORIES is a malleable and deeply personal expression of quotidian life in an unpredictable subterfuge. Choreography has been sourced from the dancers’ reflections, found narratives, and automatic writing submitted by the audience throughout the performance.
Upon entry, attendees are given miniature subway maps and an opportunity to write, share, and witness their words be integrated into the living organism of the performance. CITY STORIES honors a multiplicity of experiences, no one more privileged than the other. This hydra of narratives overlaps and diverges, a joyride no matter whose strand you follow. Coupled with wall-to-wall-to-wall video installation, CITY STORIES is surreal, gritty, sarcastic, self-aware, and poetic.
"CITY STORIES unfolds like a collection of short stories: each vignette arcs and is satisfying in its own right, and together they build the architecture of New York City’s dance." - Art Spiel
"With swift editing and hyper-saturated landscapes, McQueen brings CITY STORIES to a surreal peak, pulls it back to reality, and then rockets the audience into pumped up fantasy. Smashworks’ aesthetic voice is loud, boisterous, and welcome." - Art Spiel
PERFORMANCE HISTORY
Benny Cruz Collaborations
Smashworks Dance is a proud collaborator with Swedish artist Benny Cruz.
Over the course of a year, they found creative ways to fuse visual art and movement both virtually and in person. Smashworks performed at Benny Cruz’s art gallery opening reception at Box Factory Gallery, performed excerpts of City Stories on a rooftop alongside Cruz's text installation, and staged a public installation at Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NY.