Larissa Velez-Jackson / LVJ Performance Co.
Protecting Complexity with the Star Pû Method

June 22-25, 2022
Wednesday through Saturday at 8pm

In addition to the live in-person performances, Protecting Complexity with the Star Pû Method will be live streamed on June 23 & 24. Sliding scale tickets available here.

Performances will take place at The Chocolate Factory Theater, 38-33 24th Street, Long Island City.

In addition to the live in-person performances, Protecting Complexity with the Star Pû Method will be live streamed on June 23 & 24. Sliding scale tickets available here.

View the show program here.

The Star Pû Method is a dance-theater technique and a corresponding theater work created by Larissa Velez-Jackson in 2012, originally known as the Star Crap Method. It is a technique in which a small ensemble of dancers improvises a work together—replete with song, text, movement, sculptural elements and digital sound—by peeling away all of the layers of the moment of performance. These layers consist of the dancers’ felt experience, emotional landscape, hxstory (personal and their formal training) and what can be experienced in the room together with the audience. An important factor in the Star Pû Method is the allowance of failure, anti-climax and human ordinariness as the foreground for creative expression, on equal ground with the dancer’s exceptional stage skill. With healing as a core facet through movement, breath, communal connection and vocal sound, LVJ asks whether the performance encounter provides a space that makes healing actually possible. With an openness to the lessons accrued by failure, the Star Pû Method makes any attempt at healing and connection a form of blessing.

Creator/Artistic Director/Performer: Larissa Velez-Jackson. Choreographic collaborators/Performers: Angie Pittman and Mary Read. Lighting designer: Madeline Best. Sound designer: Larissa Velez-Jackson. Costume stylist: Marie Rao. Production manager: LD DeArmon.

Commissioned and Presented by The Chocolate Factory Theater.

Final development at The Yard in 2022. Supported by Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts’ Caroline Hearst Choreographer-In-Residence Program, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, a Mertz Gilmore Late Stage Production Stipend and a NYSCA Individual Artist Commission. Also supported by Dance/ NYC’s DISABILITY. DANCE. ARTISTRY. RESIDENCY Program, made possible by the Craig H. Nielsen Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, CreateNYC Disability Forward Fund, and The Shelly & Donald Rubin Foundation.