There are new suns is a co-curated program of interdisciplinary and experimental performance works highlighting the edges of access, disability, and race. This is the third shared program between Dal Niente and other Chicago artists.

This program is curated by Alejandro Acierto and Jose Luis Benavides, and features works by Yun Lee, Jay Afrisando, Ana Garcia Jácome, Carolyn Chen, and Ariella Granados, with performances by Ariella Granados and Dal Niente members Alejandro Acierto, Zachary Good, and Mabel Kwan.

The program opens with Yun Lee’s Space C, a poetic gesture that relies on audio descriptions of a site inaccessible to the audience. Creating an imagined “third space”, Lee’s audio descriptive conventions articulate an audio environment similar to the performance venue yet not quite the same, blurring the sites of performance that are both unavailable to the audience and ever-present in its live performance. Working directly with audio captions as a central component of his work, Jay Afrisando’s videos from his [SOUNDSCAPTION] series invite viewers to imagine sounds as they are displayed in text on the screen. Based on phone footage from 2016-2020 and made at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, his videos respond to the prevalence of audio captioning used in Zoom calls (and now TikTok videos) that became a pivotal point of access for those communicating online in languages that were not native to them.

In her video essay, Malitas: women, disability and medical violence, Ana García Jácome moves us to reconsider histories of disability in Mexico that asserts a focused politic around the systems of access and how race and gender become impacted by those negotiations. Conversely, Carolyn Chen’s adagio features performers exuding complex facial expressions as they respond to an in-ear recording barely audible to the audience. A piece that translates feeling through the performing body, it gestures towards the transcendence of sound as a medium. Lastly, Ariella Granados performs a not-yet-titled improvisational work that recalls their first encounters with language and access to highlight distinct moments of their immigrant family’s experiences with language barriers. 

There are new suns thus poetically and creatively describes multiple conditions of disability to speculate alternative relationships to sound, image, and language. Or, as Octavia Butler writes, “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”