Nate Yaffe is an experimental dance, theatre and video artist, based in Tiohtà:ke (Montreal) who researches queer strategies to create relational choreographic structures, placing performance as fundamentally a social exchange. His tactile dances dismantle movement shame through un-correcting the self-censored body.
Nate is the current co-curator at Centre de création O Vertigo (CCOV) alongside Hanako Hoshimi-Caines. He also initiated and curates the residency series, This is actively built, which brings together queer artists to attack the question ‘what is queer dance?’ challenging the classic residency structure by restituting the artists’ autonomy to allow a cross-pollination of knowledge and practices.
He is a member of the cooperative dance company Le Radeau, which develops community-centred alternatives for being a dance artist in face of the uncertain future of global capitalism and ecological collapse.
Created through radical trust in the body, Innateness choreographs itself through unconsidered movements that rip through the artist. In this solo work, Nate Yaffe offers himself up as an open orifice, spilling fleshy histories with disarming vulnerability and humor. Excavating muscle memories as artifacts accrued from a lifetime of dance training, internalized hetero-masculinity, and repressed hyperactivity, Yaffe unearths an innately queer vocabulary that lives beneath this social conditioning.
My creative history with New Dance Alliance goes a way long. Since my friend, Chivas Sandage brought me to New Dance Alliance to rehearse in early 90’s, the place has become a part of my creative life. The long time existence of the studio and Performance Mix Festival are vital to the artists who seek and explore deep into their process. Whenever I step into the studio, it’s a new space with a lot of memories. I lie down on the floor, listen to my body, and I dance. It is valuable. The time in the space nurtures my practice and artistic vision. Karen’s vision of Lift-Off residency, feedback sessions, providing peer to peer connections are more significant than ever. It has been helping us to get through 2020 and we are going into 2021.
– Nami Yamamoto
New Dance Alliance
182 Duane Street
New York, NY 10013