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⁣Potty Mouth / Wellness Woman / Educator
Fitness: @equinox
Mgmt: @momentum.models

Niki 🤍

I’ll post a before and after for this in my story - the space was limiting what I was seeing in my mind so I went and fixed it in post production :-)

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$#RevisitingNeutralGround: ASSIMILATION + IN-WAITING // @_vessels_ // @setoburrito: With the spectacle of white supremacist delusions out in full force, the themes we explored in the second section feel especially relevant. The last few years have brought an escalation of absurdities, inequities, and hypocrisies laid to bare—there is no hiding from them. With no ground to stand on, power grasps and panics with patchy logic. Weaponized narratives splinter into alternate realities. What comes in the wake of collapse? What follows the bizarre and ungraspable? Dadaism was born post-WW1, Butoh after WWII. Sending deep breaths to what’s birthing. Wishing you rest and care to your bodies, nervous systems, and communities. 💕 With ASSIMILATION + IN-WAITING we started exploring a purgatory-like waiting room and an audition to become an American. We played with abstracting modern-day gestures into movement: the to-dos, mundanities, and performances asked of us to participate/survive/assimilate. Go to work. Pay your bills. Be agreeable. Unquestioned charades. We introduced an omniscient authoritarian voice as reality TV/game show host that emerged through lots of playing and improvisation. Our performers built phrases that we fractured and merged collaboratively. It was a challenge to try to create seamless chaos. Thankfully @_shoeysun is a skillful composition queen. - Footage by @oli_crapaud. - #dance #movement #art #vesselsmove #asianartists #supportthearts #virtualperformance #immigration$

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#RevisitingNeutralGround: ARRIVAL // @_vessels_ // @nikifara: Quarry, as a stand alone section aided in the underlying theme of divine femininity that existed within Neutral Ground. The audio components including the music track composed by Cam (@kinsoriginal), laced with Kris’s mom voice, gave way to the all woman quartet. This movement drew at the power struggles of the “soft woman”. I believe it was a subtle feeling that could still be drawn with a few more colors. This would have given more possibility as to what it looks like to endure countless rejections while “battling” what it means to be yourself. The ending of quarry felt strongest in the direction of our power and dream as women; we shaded the landscape with shadows, our bodies in a diagonal, and with our hands in the air we cradled the sky. The four of us giving our support while also yearning for something to uplift us as well.
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Spread 1+3: @lillikins; Spread 2 + Footage: Luisa Alarcón
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#vesselsmove #art #artists #movementartists #dance #theatre #contemporary #identity #asianartists #supportthearts

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$#RevisitingNeutralGround: ARRIVAL // @_vessels_ // @shoeysun_: The inspiration behind Quarry are the bonds that hold groups of people together through harrowing experiences and survival. I wanted the movement and atmosphere in Quarry to embody a merging between delicate perseverance and brutal longing. Reflecting on this section, I feel like we owe it more time and complexity. I am cognizant that at some parts, it leans too closely to sentimentality and starry-eyed conjurings of resilience and suffering. How and where could we have been more direct and forward? Where could we have afforded more risk? Where could we have said “this is nice, but let's break this and use the feeling and movement as parameters to try something new?” These are the questions that remain with me as I consider the weight of making work about race and identity. Cathy Park Hong (@cathyparkhong) wrote “Writing about race is a polemic, in that we must confront white capitalist infrastructure that has erased us, but also a lyrics, in that our inner consciousness is knotted with contradictions. As much as I protest against the easy narratives of overcoming, I have to believe we will overcome racial inequities; as much as I’m exasperated by sentimental immigrant stories of suffering, I think Koreans are some of the most traumatized people I know [....] To truthfully write about race, I almost have to write against narrative because the racialized mind is, as Frantz Fanon wrote, an “infernal circle.” I’m learning that as an artist of color, I need to think about the possibility that even with the best intentions I sometimes work around or within the infernal circle instead of outside and against it. When I’m not constantly vigilant and checking my critical lens, involvement and honesty, I’m simply refracting the dominant white gaze and lenses, hence working within rather than against. — Watch Neutral Ground online now at LPAC.NYC/NEUTRAL-GROUND. — #vesselsmove #dance #movement #performance #virtualperformance #artists #supportartists #art #asianartists$

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Niki Farahani

@nikifara