June 19–22 | 7pm | Wavertree | Free
As part of the 23rd annual River To River Festival, the Seaport Museum is partnering with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council to host artist mayfield brooks for their work entitled “whale fall abyss.” Sign up today to join us for this immersive theatrical experience that will take the audience throughout the 1885 tall ship Wavertree and into the depths of maritime history.
Wavertree is the last remaining iron-hulled three-masted full-rigged cargo ship. The vessel spent most of her 24-year sailing career carrying various cargoes worldwide before being dismasted in a storm. Following this, she functioned as a floating warehouse in Chile and was repurposed as a sand barge in South America before she was thoughtfully restored by the South Street Seaport Museum. Though Wavertree was never a whaling or slave ship, brooks’s performance artfully conjures the broader maritime narrative, calling up ghosts and ancestors from the intersecting histories of whalers and slave ships.
Accompanied by electronic cellist Dorothy Carlos and performer Camilo Restrepo, brooks will expand on their 2023 performance, which also took place on Wavertree, and is a culmination of brooks’ project Whale Fall, originally commissioned by Abrons Arts Center and virtually premiered as an experimental dance film in 2021.
Advanced registration is suggested for this free event but walk-ups will be accommodated as possible. Please note that the audience will not be seated during the performance and will actively move throughout the ship. Access to Wavertree for this program involves climbing a few stairs, walking up an angled gangway, and descending a few stairs onto the deck. The lower decks are accessible via stairs, while the upper deck requires navigating steep ladder-like stairs. Doors open at 6:30pm. Last admission at 6:50pm.
If you don’t see tickets for a specific date, that performance has reached capacity. If a performance is at capacity at the time of registration, you are encouraged to try our in-person cancellation line, starting 10 minutes before each event.
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About the Performance
Choreographer mayfield brooks presents two works as part of LMCC’s River to River Festival in 2024–”whale fall abyss” in the cargo hold of Wavertree, and “whale fall reckoning” in the Upper Gallery of The Arts Center at Governors Island. Using found objects, sound, light, movement and projection, brooks conjures an abyssal underwater world that transforms the formerly munitions storage warehouse into an imagined site of the decomposed whale.
Both presentations are a culmination of brooks’ project Whale Fall. After four years of rigorous research and numerous iterations, brooks’s ever evolving project continues to decompose itself. This iteration lives as a call to the wild parts of ourselves, a denouement to complacent attitudes towards death and decay. How are we entangled in the ruse of romance with our compulsion to consume and our dependence on war machines? Why do we continue to kill? How can the whale fall reorient us to face our own mortality with more compassion? brooks considers the whale fall as a reckoning. They imagine their ancestor’s bones mingling with whale bones beckoning us to embrace interspecies care and relation beyond the human. Perhaps we can save the whales, ourselves, and the planet if we simply decompose.
mayfield brooks is part of LMCC’s Extended Life Dance Development Program supported, in part, by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Presented in partnership with the South Street Seaport Museum.
Extend Your Visit
Access to Wavertree is included with your event ticket. To extend your visit and see more that the Museum has to offer, ask Museum staff about our Pay What You Wish General Admission tickets when you check in. Before or after your event, between 11am–5pm, get Pay What You Wish General Admission tickets to see more of the Museum.
General Admission includes access to all current exhibitions on view in the introduction gallery space at 12 Fulton Street and access to the 1885 tall ship Wavertree. Free timed tickets for a tour of the 1908 lightship Ambrose are available separately at no additional cost.
About the Performers
mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their experimental dance film, Whale Fall and a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist. They were a 2022–23 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and is currently the 2024 Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA with the World Arts and Cultures/Dance program. They love living by the sea.
camilo is a Colombian artist and designer, experimenter and explorer of the body and movement, performer, improviser, psychomagus, swimmer and energy worker based in New York, a creative, mystic and adventurous being, hungering for simplicity and for mental, physical and energetic expansion.
Dorothy Carlos is an experimental cellist and electronic musician working in improvised performance and multi-channel sound in New York City and Chicago. Her work utilizes randomized electronics and extended techniques to explore fragility and imaginaries. Solo performances have been presented internationally by e-flux, Experimental Sound Studio Chicago, Big Ears Festival, default, Center for New Music and Associated Technologies (CNMAT) at UC Berkeley, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Dorothy has been featured as an artist and collaborator in projects presented at the Swiss Institute (New York), Night Gallery (Los Angeles), Artists Space (New York), Performance Space (New York), Untitled Art Fair (Miami), Gaudeamus Festival (Utrecht, NL) and the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from NYU where she studied classical cello and anthropology on full scholarship, and an MFA in sound from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Dorothy is the current Alba Artist in Residence at Experimental Sound Studio Chicago.
This program is presented in partnership with Lower Manhattan Cultural Council as part of the 2024 River To River Festival.
Ready for more?
Head over to our Programs and Events page to see what else is happening at the Museum. Sign up for an upcoming talk, learn more about visiting Wavertree, or explore our virtual offerings.