Unscripted Metamorphosis, a Ripening Installation featuring She-Yeti & the Wild Womyn Experts
Vanessa Walters/Ripening
“Unscripted Metamorphosis” summons Ripening’s She-Yeti and her cousins, the Wild Womyn Experts, to the center of Times Square, where passersby witness an experimental performance installation documenting their unholy emergence into a fantastical world of exquisite monstrosity, fierce self-empowerment, and adamant refusal. She-Yeti and the Wild Womyn Experts have been called a vibrant coven of energies. A pack of female-animal-human-spirit hybrids. They are your ancient fairy beastmothers. Like She-Yeti, each Wild Womyn Expert is a unique creature all her own: equal measure of beast and unlikely beauty, of primordial intuition and youthful curiosity, who gives birth to her own untapped wildness through a surreal and unforgettable metamorphosis. Faced with compounded calamities of habitat loss, extinction, and misogyny across the millennia, The Wild Womyn Experts channel their beastly impropriety as a means to reject complacency and exclusion—and kindle the fires of this wildness within all of us.
This performance installation in improvisational and it will be different each evening. The sound design will include elements of improvisation, in the moment music making, as well as recorded elements including readings. A featured reading is “Edenic Time,” by Jessie Kindig. On Wednesday and Friday, the Wild Womyn Experts include Gwen Gussman, Joey Kipp, and Lucy York Struever. On Thursday, the Wild Womyn Experts include Gwen Gussman, Joey Kipp, and LaWanda Hopkins.
About the Artists
Performance: Vanessa Walters, Omar Zubair, Gwendolyn Gussman, Joey Kipp, Lucy York Struever, and LaWanda Hopkins
Choreography: Vanessa Walters
Sound design: Omar Zubair
Vanessa Walters is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, director, filmmaker, and performer. Her ever-expanding multimedia project Ripening explores our emotional and psychological relationships with Time, and the wonder and cruelty it wreaks. Ripening has been featured at Lincoln Center, Tribeca Film Festival, Triskelion Arts, NADA Art Fair/Art Basel, FLICfest Dance Festival, amongst others. Walters was lead choreographer/dancer for Fischerspooner for 11 years and toured with Gogol Bordello for 2 years. She also collaborates with artist / director Marcel Dzama and is the show choreographer for TruTV’s “At Home with Amy Sedaris.” Walters is a 2020 Harkness Foundation for Dance Grantee for Ripening.
For more information on Vanessa Walters, visit her website and follow her on Instagram.
