FRESH TRACKS

This year, the Fresh Tracks Residency and Performance program celebrates its 60th anniversary. This season’s Fresh Tracks features the up-and-coming artists Ayo Ohs, Kashia Kancey, Jade Manns, and Maxi Hawkeye Canion, showcasing their unique styles.

“I want you to know– that I love you…Why don’t you love me?” Ayo Ohs earnestly asks the audience in their piece to:dance. At first, a waning presentation, it morphed into an intimate crash-out only to be transformed into an emotional, smoke-filled cabaret performance Ayo Ohs will never let you guess their next move as they take us on a journey of rejection and rehabilitation. “It’s killing me slowly” they sing in their ill-fitting, sparkly dress. They have not escaped their loss completely but are now further along on their path to healing.

Kashia Kancey’s I’m in the Middle of the Ocean, and I Can’t See You begins with four Black women dressed in Victorian garb slowly sprouting out of a piano framed in light. In a line, they thrash their bodies, eyes wide open, twitching, while pointing and shouting directly at the audience. Kancey cultivated an existential world grappling with personal identity—the constant fight for self-salvation and, along the way, self-destruction. The piece poses the question, how much are you willing to sacrifice for absolute liberation? A creative visionary, Kashia Kancey is the standout of the night and deserves every second of her standing ovation.

Superposition by Jade Manns explores the body’s relationship to the environment around them. Manns blurs the lines between animal and human, tapping into primal instincts. Like two monkeys fighting over a banana, they rock back and forth, waiting to pounce on each other before jolting forward with their bodies. Superposition took its time to showcase our ancestral connection to early members of the homo genus.

A mutant imp-like chicken creature delivers itself out of a steaming trash bag. Maxi Hawkeye Canion’s flesh-talker is a mixed-media, interdisciplinary piece that evokes a sense of disturbance in its audience. Drops of water fall from a black sack dangling in the air.

They begin to bathe, and the water quickly turns red as they sit on the floor in the fetal position. Flesh-talker articulates the experience of living in a dystopia. Canion’s existential perspective on the current state of the world is not only refreshingly delicious but also strikingly intuitive and terrifyingly in touch.

It is very clear that all of these artsts have an incredible capacity to create with vigorous ingenuity, and I’m eager to see where it will take them.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY –Frankie Lehr

All photos by Maria Baranova