The High Line and Frieze present Matty Davis' "Die No Die (The High Line)"

Matty Davis is an artist and choreographer engaged in collaborative explorations of risk, trust, responsibility, and empathy. His work predominantly manifests in performance and dance. Davis foregrounds the body as a means to enliven tensions inherent in our being—between fragility and strength, the individual and the collective, and life and death. His performances are characterized by their intense physicality and inventive choreography, often orchestrated to be directly responsive to and engaged with his audience.

For the High Line, Matty Davis presents Die No Die (The High Line), a site-responsive work undertaken by Davis and six collaborators—Nile Harris, Chloé Cooper Jones, Anna Thompson, Taylor Knight, Bryan Saner, and Tony Orrico (via Davis). Each evening, the performers and the audience traverse the High Line together, from the park’s southern entrance at Gansevoort Street to the Spur. Each performer navigates the work’s choreographic structure in four parts: ‘The Critical Gesture of Arrival,’ ‘The Gem,’ ‘Send the Heart Deeper,’ and ‘Oppositional States.’ This happens one performer at a time, in linear succession, at six pre-determined stops along the High Line. Each performer signals to the next through the felt beat of their hearts—the heart signifying a baton in the relay of life—and in the forward motion of performance itself.

Supported by a free original publication that mirrors the path of the performance, Die No Die engages a wide range of concerns: architectural, historical, ecological, and personal. Together, the performance and publication explore freedom, demand, and our responsibility to the transference of life between and among bodies that propel all of us forward.

In conjunction with Die No Die (The High Line), Davis also presents a 45’ x 25’ work at The Shed for Frieze New York. Using site-specific images scaled 1:1 with the artist’s body, original photographs and drawings, and other materials sourced directly from the High Line, Davis articulates Die No Die’s choreographic structure in installation form.

Die No Die (The High Line) is a co-commission by High Line Art and Frieze.

EVENT INFORMATION

Check in for the performance will be on the High Line at Gansevoort St. and Washington St. at 5pm.

The audience and performers will then walk north along the High Line to Little W 12th St, underneath The Standard, for the first choreographed stop. The performance will continue north, stopping at each location noted on a map that will be shared prior to the event. The procession will turn east at 30th Street, culminating on the Spur at 10th Avenue.

Please note that attendees will be walking ~1 mile from the south end to the north end of the park, which will take approximately 75 minutes. There will be opportunities to sit on park benches throughout the performance. If you would prefer to not walk, you may join the performance at one of the sites it will engage.

The performance happens rain or shine.

ARTIST BIO

Matty Davis (b. 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) lives and works in New York, New York. Davis’ work has been featured at institutions including Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, Texas (2023); The Momentary, Bentonville, Arkansas (2023); Center for Performance Research, New York, New York (2022); Kanal Centre Pompidou, Brussels, Belgium (2021); The Miller Institute for Contemporary Art, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2019); and The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (2018). He has participated in prominent international artist residencies, including at The Momentary, Bentonville, Arkansas (2022); Ucross Foundation, Clearwater, Wyoming (2022); Art Omi, Ghent, New York (2020); and The Watermill Center, Watermill, New York (2016).

PERFORMER BIOS

Chloé Cooper Jones

Chloé Cooper Jones is a professor, journalist, and the author of the memoir Easy Beauty, which was named a best book of 2022 by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Time magazine, and was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir. She was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Feature Writing in 2020. She is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient, a Howard Foundation Fellow, and an Associate Professor of Writing at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Nile Harris

Nile Harris is a performer and director of live works of art. He has done a few things and hopes to do a few more, God willing.

Taylor Knight and Anna Thompson

Taylor Knight and Anna Thompson are co-founding artistic directors of slowdanger, a multidisciplinary performance entity utilizing movement, found material, integrative technology, electronic instrumentation, and vocalization to produce performance work since 2013. Based out of Pittsburgh, PA, slowdanger synergizes mediums, utilizing process-based practice to delve into circular life patterning including effort, transformation, and death. They have been featured in or by Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch,” MoMA, The Kennedy Center, The Andy Warhol Museum, Usine C (France), and more. They were 2022 awardees of the NPN Creation Fund and NEFA/National Dance Project to create their work SUPERCELL, which premiered in 2023 at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland and the Kelly Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh.

Tony Orrico

Tony Orrico is known for his ingenuity within the intersections of performance and drawing. His works investigate mental and physical endurance, somatic drawing, choreography, bio-geometrics and improvisational practices. Orrico has performed/exhibited his work across the US and internationally in Australia, Belgium, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Mexico, Norway, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain. His visual work is in the permanent collections of The National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC) and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC, Mexico City) as well as prominent private collections such as Grazyna Kulczyk, Kablanc/Fundación Otazu and Bergmeier/Kunstsaele among others. He has presented at the CCCB, Centre Pompidou-Metz, The New Museum, and Poptech 2011: The World Rebalancing. Orrico was one of a select group of artists to re-perform the work of Marina Abramovic during her retrospective at MoMA (2010). As a former member of Trisha Brown Dance Company and Shen Wei Dance Arts, Orrico has graced such stages as the Sydney Opera House, Teatro La Fenice, New York State Theater, and Theatre du Palais-Royal. Orrico is currently an Assistant Professor of Sculpture & Intermedia, and Dance at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City. In 2020, Orrico was included in the book PERFORMANCE DRAWING: New Practices since 1945, a collection of interviews and essays exploring the relationship between drawing and performance, published by Bloomsbury.

Bryan Saner

I have made my living doing a combination of creative socially active practices: industrial arts, restoration, repair, making, teaching, and performing. Each discipline participates in the other's goals without separation. I try to make long-term commitments to collaborate closely with artists and activists. We are developing alternative creative, educational, and economic communities inside and outside of existing established systems. We congregate in private and public architectural spaces, theoretical institutions, and human bodies. These practices endeavor to advance culture by building, destroying, and rebuilding human spaces and relationships.

Organized by Taylor Zakarin, Associate Curator, High Line Art.

SUPPORT

Matty Davis, Die No Die (The High Line), 2024 is co-commissioned by Frieze.

Lead support for High Line Art comes from Amanda and Don Mullen. Major support is provided by Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip E. Aarons, The Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston, and Charina Endowment Fund.

High Line Art is supported, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the New York City Council, under the leadership of Speaker Adrienne Adams.

PHOTO CREDIT

Matty Davis, Die No Die (The High Line), 2024. A High Line Performance co-commissioned by High Line Art and Frieze. On view April 30 – May 2, 2024. Photo by Jonah Rosenberg. Courtesy of Friends of the High Line and Frieze.

ACCESSIBILITY

We encourage all persons with disabilities to attend. To request additional information regarding accessibility or accommodations at a program, please contact [email protected]. Program venues are accessible via wheelchair.

Reminder that this performance is in English only but speakers of all languages can still enjoy this performance due to the movement-based nature of the program. Interpretation is not available for this program.

PHOTO CONSENT

By attending this event, you agree that photos and/or video footage of you may be taken, and you grant your permission to Friends of the High Line and its agents/licensees to use such photos/footage for promotional and other purposes.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The High Line, 820 Washington Street, New York, United States