Event details 
Saturday, February 24, 2024
1 pm

Dia Beacon 
3 Beekman Street 
Beacon, New York 

Free with museum admission.

For the duration of Rita McBride: Arena Momentum at Dia Beacon, an expanding body of artists, performers, writers, musicians, and dancers activates physical and virtual spaces as part of a series of engagements with McBride’s Arena (1997). The series, collectively called Momentum, is initiated by the artist with the experimental performance collective discoteca flaming star (founded by Cristina Gomez Barrio and Wolfgang Mayer) and artist and choreographer Alexandra Waierstall.

For this iteration of Momentum, Volker Bertelmann, also known as Hauschka, will perform a solo piano improvisation in response to a choreographic engagement by Alexandra Waierstall. The hour-long performance will feature dancers Scott Jennings and Ying Yun Chen. Hauschka and Waierstall have collaborated on choreographic productions since 2015, and this program is part of the musician’s 2024 North American tour.

Visitors may walk and sit among the performers on Arena as the performance unfolds. 

Please note that the Momentum performances will involve nudity. Photography in the Rita McBride: Arena Momentum galleries will not be permitted on the event date.

This is the second activation of Momentum at Dia Beacon. Subsequent durational performances will take place in May and November 2024.

Hauschka (Volker Bertelmann) was born in Kreuztal, West Germany, in 1966. He is a composer, pianist, and musician known for his interdisciplinary and experimental practices. His albums include Abandoned City (2014), What If? (2017), and Philanthropy (2023). Hauschka has composed scores for films and television series including Patrick Melrose (2018), Ammonite (2020), and War Sailor (2022), and is the recipient of an Academy Award (2022) as well as a British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award (2022). Hauschka lives in Düsseldorf.

Alexandra Waierstall was born in England and raised in Cyprus. Her conceptual choreographic practice attends to the relationships between time, memory, presence, and embodiment, and unfolds from ongoing dialogues with dancers as collaborators. Waierstall advocates for a form of radical attentiveness in different contexts, including theaters, galleries, museums, publications, and public spaces. Since 2016, she has choreographed engagements with Rita McBride’s Arena (1997). Her projects have been co-produced by tanzhaus nrw Düsseldorf, and she has presented works at the Musée du Louvre, Paris (2017); Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London (2018); and Bauhaus Museum Dessau, Germany (2020), among other institutions. Waierstall has choreographed work for the National Dance Company Wales and tanzmainz, Staatstheater Mainz, Germany. She lives in Düsseldorf.

Rita McBride: Arena Momentum is organized by Alexis Lowry, former curator at Dia, with Emily Markert, curatorial assistant. Public programming for the exhibition is organized by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, curator and co–department head at Dia, with Emily Markert, and produced with Kim Golding, programs associate.

All exhibitions at Dia are made possible by the Economou Exhibition Fund.

Rita McBride: Arena Momentum is made possible by major support from Brenda R. Potter. Significant support provided by Erika Glazer, and additional support by a Board Discretionary Grant of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Graham Steele and Ulysses de Santi, and Konrad Fischer Galerie. 

Choreographic interludes production by Noema Dance Works e.V., in collaboration with Dia.

Support provided by Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, Kulturamt der Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf.

Rita McBride is grateful for the support of Momentum afforded by the 2020–2023 Lee Krasner Award for lifetime achievement.