Nate Yaffe

Nate Yaffe | faith hole

Created through radical trust in the body, “faith hole” choreographs itself through the unconsidered movements that rip through the artist. Going relentlessly forward, always embracing its future iteration, dismissing nostalgic lingerings of “self,” yet exposing the splinters of personhood to the public. In this solo work Yaffe cultivates a non-transactional exchange between performer and audience, offering himself as an open orifice spilling fleshy histories with unguarded emotion. By excavating muscle memories as artifacts from a history of domination through classical dance training, internalized hetero-masculine values, and restrained hyperactivity, Yaffe strives to reveal the innately queer vocabulary that lives beneath.

Nathan Yaffe is a Montreal-based contemporary dance and video artist, whose research explores the intersection of virtual life and the somatic body. the_johnsons 00:11:56, a dance-film examining privacy and surveillance culture was presented as part of the Cinedans festival in Amsterdam, as wells as film festivals across Canada. The related interactive video-dance installation the_johnsons 00:21:51, was presented in Montreal at the Darling Foundry, Eastern Bloc and Monument National in 2015-16. His newest piece for stage, Dunno wat u kno premiered at Tangente in March 2017. As a performer, Nathan earned a Helen Hayes award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the role he created in Mollye Maxner’s play Occupied Territories (2015).

faith hole will be presented at MAI on November 8, 9 and 10, 2019.