“In Bed With…” is a series of intimate two-on-one encounters between the artist duo Gerard & Kelly and others taking place on mattresses dispersed throughout the research presentation for “P.O.L.E. (People, Objects, Language, Exchange)” in the Fifth Floor gallery. Each encounter will explore questions of precarity, work, choreography, objects, poetry, and the transmission of performance scores.

October 29, 2014: In Bed With…Chris Kraus
November 1, 2014: In Bed With…Andrea Fraser
December 13, 2014: In Bed With…Heather McGhee
January 10, 2015: In Bed With…Tere O’Connor

Gerard & Kelly work within an interdisciplinary framework to create project-based installations and performances that use choreography, writing, and a range of other mediums to address questions of sexuality, collective memory, and the formation of queer consciousness. This fall, they are developing a new project—“P.O.L.E. (People, Objects, Language, Exchange)”—that continues their investigations of the choreography of relationships and the movement of cultural transmission via the vernacular of pole dancing. Their research utilizes multiple spaces throughout the Museum, includes public programs and workshops, and will culminate with a solo exhibition on view in the Museum’s Lobby Gallery from February 4 to 15, 2015.

Tere O’Connor is Artistic Director of Tere O’Connor Dance and Professor of Dance at the Center for Advanced Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has created over forty works for his company that have since been performed throughout the US, Europe, South America, and Canada. He has also developed numerous commissioned works for other dance companies, including the Lyon Opera Ballet, France, and the White Oak Dance Project, as well as solo works for Mikhail Baryshnikov and Jean Butler. O’Connor received a 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, was a 2009 United States Artist Rockefeller Fellow and a 1993 Guggenheim Fellow, and has been bestowed three awards at the New York Dance and Performance Awards ceremony, also known as the Bessies, among his other accolades. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, New England Foundation for the Arts/National Dance Project, the MAP Fund, and others. In October 2014, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. O’Connor has taught at festivals and universities around the world for twenty-five years and is an active participant in the New York dance community, mentoring young artists, teaching, writing, and volunteering in various capacities. His most recent work, BLEED, premiered at BAM’s Next Wave festival in December 2013 and continues on a tour through the United States with upcoming stops at On the Boards in Seattle and the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis. The company will present a week of encore performances of BLEED at Danspace Project in New York City, December 18–20.