[World Premiere] Juliana F. May: FOLK INCEST

In FOLK INCEST, five women interrogate seemingly unrepresentable subject matters including the Holocaust, sexual trauma, and the fetishization of young girls. As pop cultural references, genres, and bodily traumas compress into each other, the work’s biting humor offers catharsis, simultaneously critiquing and supporting abstraction.

A Guggenheim and NYFA Fellow, Juliana F. May has created nine works since 2002, including seven evening-length pieces with commissions from Dance Theater Workshop, New York Live Arts, The Chocolate Factory Theater, Barnard College, The New School and The American Realness Festival. May has been awarded grants and residencies through The Map Fund, The Jerome foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Gibney Dance In Process. May is the Artistic Advisor for New York Live Arts’ Fresh Tracks Residency Program as well as teaching composition at Sarah Lawrence College. May holds a BA in Dance and Art History from Oberlin College.

FOLK INCEST is commissioned by Abrons Arts Center through the Abrons AIRspace Residency Program. Juliana F.  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, and the Sustainable Arts 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.

Image: Chris Cameron