Event Details
Friday–Sunday, October 13–15, 2023 
12–4 pm daily 

Dia Beacon 
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, New York

Free with museum admission.
The performance is durational; visitors may come and go as they wish.

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 choreographer Alexandra Waierstall.

Over three days in October, Waierstall—who has engaged in dialogue with Arena in various contexts since 2016—presents choreographic interludes as part of the Momentum series. These interludes bring together New York–based professional dancers as well as dancers from Europe with whom Waierstall frequently collaborates, creating a unique gathering that fosters connection between these communities, the public, and the physical space of Arena. Each day, the dancers make cyclical encounters with the work and one another, growing and changing individually and as a group, as the choreography opens a space for contemplation in which everyone present can find themselves. discoteca flaming star simultaneously engages in small acts using sound and drawings, connecting with the dancers and audience.

Momentum is durational in nature; visitors may come and go as they wish and are invited to walk and sit among the performers 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 dates.

Subsequent durational activations take place in May and November 2024.

discoteca flaming star (DFS) is an interdisciplinary, collaborative group that aims to be a space where all kinds of artists can experiment with different paths for contemporary aesthetic praxis, searching for its limits, and avoiding processes of formalization. Through conceptual, visual, and musical transfers, they create performances, sculptures, drawings, stages, and situations whose foremost intention is to question and challenge the memory of the public, transforming old desires and finding invented pasts, or pasts which never occurred. Their work has been shown at numerous venues, including Artists Space, New York; Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid; De Appel Amsterdam; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; MUMOK, Vienna; Tate Modern, London; The Kitchen, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Cristina Gómez Barrio and Wolfgang Mayer have been the base of DFS since 1998. Currently DFS are: CGB, Sofia Lomba, WM, and Sara Pereira. 

Cristina Gómez Barrio was born in the Alhambra, Spain, in 1973. She studied in Madrid, Munich, and Berlin, and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, New York. She works with drawing, performance, photography, and dreams. She lives in Berlin.

Wolfgang Mayer was born in Wertach, Germany, in 1967. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, New York, where he studied with Ron Clark. He works primarily with drawing, shimmering dust, video, and performance. His projects, including those with discoteca flaming star, have been shown internationally. Mayer lives in Berlin.

Rita McBride was born in Des Moines in 1960 and lives in Düsseldorf and Los Alamos, California. She received a BA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. In 1988, she began exploring architectural and sculptural form in works ranging from small-scale objects to public commissions. Her major public commissions include Mae West, Munich (2011); Bells and Whistles, the New School, New York (2014); and Obelisk of Tutankhamun, Cologne (2017). Major presentations include Rita McBride: Public Tilt, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2014–15); Rita McBride: Gesellschaft, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, Germany, and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2015–16); Rita McBride: Explorer, Wiels Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels (2017–18); Particulates, Dia Chelsea, New York (2017–18); National Chain 2020/Social Practices (in collaboration with Alexandra Waierstall and Fontys Dance Academy), Museum De Pont, Tilburg, the Netherlands (2021); and Rita McBride: Particulates, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023). In 2001, she initiated a series of genre-bending publications that often use anonymous, collective writing structures. In 2018, she also initiated Particulates, an anthology of science fiction, edited by Nalo Hopkinson, that accompanied her exhibition Particulates at Dia Chelsea. McBride’s first project with Dia was a performative lecture on the work of Rosemarie Trockel as part of the 2003 Artists on Artists series.

Alexandra Waierstall was born in England and raised in Cyprus. She approaches choreography as a vehicle for developing new skills and knowledge for living together, connecting bodies, life-forms, and environments: used as an act of empowerment, a way to reinvent our world anew. Waierstall’s conceptually and physically detailed investigations are expressed through choreographies, installations, and film works in which she crafts sounds, texts, images, and the moving body. Key concepts in her practice include the relationships between time, memory, presence, and embodiment, rooted in an ongoing dialogue with highly attuned dancers as collaborators. She advocates for a form of radical attentiveness in different contexts, including theaters, galleries, museums, publications, and public spaces. Her collaboration with Rita McBride, in dialogue with Arena, spans seven years. Her projects have been co-produced by tanzhaus nrw Düsseldorf, and she has presented works at Bauhaus Museum Dessau, Germany; Crossing Festival, Beijing; Dansens hus, Oslo; Dansens Hus, Stockholm; FIAC, Musée du Louvre, Paris; Fórum Cultural Mundial, SESC Pompéia, São Paulo; Fringe Festival, Shanghai; Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany; Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt; Museum De Pont, Tilburg, the Netherlands; Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London; and Seoul International Improvisation Dance Festival, among others. Waierstall has also choreographed work for the National Dance Company of Wales and tanzmainz, Staatstheater Mainz, Germany. She lives in Düsseldorf.

Dancers: Maxi Canion, Ying Yun Chen, Rachel Gill, Allysen Hooks, Scott Jennings, Amy Josh, Dasol Kim, Georgios Kotsifakis, Rebecca Margolick, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, Evangelia Randou, Andrea Farley Shimota, Eftychia Stefanou, Karolina Szymura.

Collaborators: Volker Bertelmann, Stavros Gasparatos, Cédric Hopf, Judith Jaeger, Valeria Lampadova, Lucia Vonrhein, Randy Gibson, Sofia Lomba, Sara Pereira.

Rita McBride: Arena Momentum is organized by Alexis Lowry, curator, with Emily Markert, curatorial assistant.

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 2020–2021 Lee Krasner Award for lifetime achievement.