Sundays on Broadway and co-curators Martita Abril and Weis present a tribute to Aat Hougée featuring works by Yoshiko Chuma, Gabri Christa, Fast Forward, Mimi Goese, K.J. Holmes, Lucy Sexton, and Sally Silvers.

Aat Hougée (1945-2021), had an indelible influence on experimental dance and performance. In the two schools he led, the Opleiding Moderne Dans in Amsterdam (later SNDO) and the European Dance Development Center (EDDC) in Arnhem, he created structures and bent rules, enabling students to learn from innovative dance and performance artists, musicians and composers, designers, video artists, thinkers. He asked that artists “teach what you don’t know,” teach their explorations of the moment. The list of guests he invited to teach and perform reads like a Who’s Who of Downtown Dance of the 80s and 90s. An illustrious group of artists he especially championed will be performing in honor of Aat on this program.

The Offbeat goes on and turns common conceptions about dance and music on their ear. Yoshiko Chuma has a fondness for metronomes. In her slightly fractured English, the choreographer-dancer explains how, “even if you put them at the same speed, each one is different, like you and me.” Then she pushes the metaphor further, to include the inevitable: “Wound metronomes, after half an hour, almost start dying.” “I pick this word the "offbeat" - refers to any musical beat or rhythmic subdivision that is not a main, accented beat within a measure, but rather falls on a weaker beat or in the spaces between the main beats. In a 4/4 time signature, where beats 1 and 3 are strong and 2 and 4 are weak, the offbeats can be the weak beats themselves (2 and 4) or the "ands" between the quarter notes when playing eighth notes. This placement of rhythmic emphasis on weaker or unaccented parts of the beat is a form of syncopation and is common in genres like funk, reggae, and jazz.”

Aattack is a dance / talk by Gabri Christa about Aat Hougee / SNDO and his influence in dance and life, from the moment they met in 1981 through the years.

Fast Forward will present Aat Music.

Mimi Goese was hired by Aat Hougée multiple times (CDDC,EDDC and Düsseldorf) and taught workshops on “Love” and “How to be strong on stage no matter what you do”. The short film, If You Want to Sleep, created by Mimi for this event, is dedicated to Aat’s artistic perspective.

K.J. Holmes will be performing an improvised solo entering into the memory and imagination of her time spent teaching and performing at the European Dance Development Center (EDDC) in the 1990’s. While she taught there, she lived with Aat.

Lucy Sexton, DANCENOISE co-creator with Anne Iobst, will introduce a video from1989, the same era in which we were invited by Aat to come teach. Video: Wigstock (1989, Tompkins Sq Park) recorded by director Tom Rubnitz (1956-1992)

AAT: At All Times or American Anxiety Testifies In honor of Aat, Sally Silvers will make a dance based on her videoed solo improvisations from her ‘free time’ in the Arnhem and Dusseldorf studios while teaching workshops there in 1993, ’94, ’95, ’96, ’98 & ’99. These videos became key ‘raw material’ for a striking number of the group and solo dances Silvers made and continues to choreograph and present in NYC. Her solo will ricochet between material related to her EDDC workshops in improvisation and composition she taught that centered on source materials outside of dance and these recordings of her studio improvisations.

Sundays on Broadway
6:00 p.m. - doors open at 5:45 p.m.
WeisAcres, 537 Broadway #3
New York, NY 10012

All donations go to the performers.
$5-20 suggested.

Artists' Bios:

Yoshiko Chuma, a Japanese-born conceptual artist, choreographer, and director of the Bessie Award–winning School of Hard Knocks, has been a fearless presence in New York’s downtown performance scene since the late 1970s. Without formal dance training, she forged an experimental practice that defies categories—blurring dance, theater, music, film, and visual art into unpredictable, boundary-crossing works. Over four decades she has created hundreds of productions, staged in venues ranging from Lincoln Center to Sarajevo’s National Theater to private living rooms, and carried her work across more than forty countries, often inserting herself into politically charged or physically risky spaces to explore the “mythology of danger.” Known for her eccentric wit, multimedia inventiveness, and refusal to make declarative statements, Yoshiko continues to confound definitions while building a global network of thousands of collaborators and sustaining one of the most radical legacies in postmodern performance.

Gabri Christa came from the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao to the Netherlands and ended up in the selection year of opleiding moderne dans ( now SNDO) in 1981 where she met Aat. Graduating in 1986, she went on to create and live in Cuba, Puerto Rico and New York where she now resides https://www.gabrichrista.com

Fast Forward is a UK/US composer and musician known for creating bold, genre-defying works that merge experimental music with live performance. He studied music at Mills College with David Behrman and Robert Ashley (1976–78). He was a featured performer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company under the musical direction of Takehisa Kosugi.He met Aat in 1986 in Amsterdam.

Mimi Goese is a multi-disciplinary artist, with a background in post-modern dance choreography. Her career in music spans decades including work used by “A$AP Rocky” and on the TV shows “The Sopranos” and “Stranger Things”. Hired by Aat Hougée multiple times (CDDC,EDDC and Düsseldorf), Mimi taught workshops on “Love” and “How to be strong on stage no matter what you do”.

K.J. Holmes: dance artist; travels nationally/internationally teaching/per­forming at universities, festivals, unexpected venues; Performed/collaborated with Lisa Nelson/Image Lab, Steve Paxton, Simone Forti, filmmaker Matthew Barney, poet Julie Carr, musicians Jeremy Carlstedt, Juan Ignacio Ferreras, Roy Campbell, Jr., choreographers Miguel Gutierrez, Xavier LeRoy, Karinne Keithley Seyers, among many others; Currently devising Blu/print. NYC: Adjunct faculty NYU/ETW, Movement Research; Led Art as Experience events at MoMA; assisted Simone Forti reconstructing her Dance Constructions. Her teaching is not separate from art making; she brings her practices together in an alchemy of experiential life and living.

DANCENOISE is Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton. The duo began making dance- based performances in 1983, initially emerging at the crossroads of no- wave, punk, radical feminism, performance art, modern dance, and the East Village nightclub scene. They performed at such NYC clubs and theaters as WOW Cafe, the Pyramid, 8BC, Performance Space 122, Franklin Furnace, the Kitchen, and Lincoln Center, and went on to tour nationally and internationally. In 1989 they received a NY Dance and Performance Award, Bessie, for their show “All the Rage.” In July 2015 DANCENOISE was invited to create and perform a week-long retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. They performed at Danspace Project’s Platform 2016, Charles Atlas’s Follies at The Kitchen (2017), and Franklin Furnace's Performance & Politics at Pratt; they premiered "Lock Em Up" at NY Live Arts in Dec 2018, celebrated their 40th year with a street performance in 2023, and were recently featured in La Mama's Coffeehouse Chronicles (Feb 2025).

Sally Silvers is a Guggenheim Foundation and “Bessie” award-winning choreographer who has been making work since the 1980’s. She has articles, essays, and poems published in magazines, chapbooks, journals and anthologies — most recently in 2024 from Ugly Duckling Press: Upstage, a book combining her photography and Bruce Andrews’s pandemic-era text collages from signage in Asbury Park, NJ. She choreographed 3 musicals for the Sundance Theater Festival, is the co-director of 2 award-winning dance films & her work is being archived and recorded by the New York City Performing Arts Library. She is also known for several large dance community curatorial projects: TalkTalkWalkWalk (combining dance artists and poets) and Surprise Every Time (a festival of ‘live choreography’ – making work live in front of the audience on the spot). From 2005 to 2011 she danced in the new and historical works of Yvonne Rainer. www.SallySilversDance.com