Just recently, I had the opportunity to finally spend some time getting to know a young woman I had seen perform with
Yula Beeri several times. Her name is Mariana J. Plick.
Music, the Punk Music of
Yula &the eXtended Family is what brought all of us together, well here,
as I like to do for my readers, I'll let Mariana (Annie) tell you her story::
Hi Pete,
I'm a circus performer and director. After residing in Philadelphia,
then New York City, I moved to Montréal. While practicing in New York
City, I enrolled in a professional program at Circus Warehouse, a circus
training facility which trains acrobats.
TheHiveNYC is my artistic
home.
The Hive is resolution. In New York City, a casino of dreams, artists
habitated for decades in a mecca of creativity. With an expensivity
incline, higher priced housing, and the foundations of capital
enterprise, such people now find an inhospitable economic environment
there. The natural environment itself in New York suffered losses, trees
dying amidst concrete body bounds in sidewalks littered by refuse and
vomit.
Not all of the city embodies
this view, but a lot of the terrain speaks exactly to such dystopian
visions. Those for whom creativity evolves of empathy and emotion
encounter difficulties for such to flourish while crammed into a metal
subway car in direct proximity to several drained individuals, whose
vision for their lives in New York bespoke something so far from what
they've managed to find there.
 |
| Mariana with Yula&XFM, at Rockaway Beach. |
In such a place, The Hive embodies a safe space to create art and
relationships. In a small space of time I watched it grow into a
beautiful theater, through which many aspiring artists of New York found
ground to grow their visions. I met Yula through friends in the
punk/music scene between Philadelphia and New York. My friend Kriss
Marchena was managing Yula and the eXtended Family for a time, and they
invited our friends from Philadelphia to The Hive to meet and discuss
how to link our ideas together, reinforcing the dendrites between us so
as to support one another. At the end of the night
Yula played piano,
which is always the most inspiring sound to hear.
I met Jason Yellen while at the Hive, on a day I made a video with Yula,
Sarah Zar, and some others. He had actually read poetry at the first event I
produced/directed in Philadelphia, called The Elegant Skeleton at
Bookspace, an eccentric concoction of circus, poetry, and music. I began
a mini Hive in Philadelphia at Bookspace for a Summer with the help of
some friends, but once I moved to New York it was absorbed back into the
ensconces of the city.
 |
| Ahhhhh, Mariana at The HiveNYC |
One particular aspiration that The Hive supported: Cirque Squelettique.
The project simply would not have existed without The Hive. Cirque
Squelettique collects ideas and transports them into the corporeal. I
wrote a movement narrative,
Cirque Skeletique, which embodies the
first full length incarnation of these ideas. This show grows through
the lens of post-modernist critiques on bio political engineering,
security culture, fascism, and other oppressive forces in societies such
as New York City. The skills involved ranged from sword swallowing,
belly dance, shurikan card/knife throwing, freak show, aerial
acrobatics, contortion, illusionism, juggling, break dancing, and more.
The show ran for three nights at The Hive, and one night in
Philadelphia. My goal is to create commentary on how I see these things
affecting us, and to traverse the terrain between the voiceless and
unvoiced, to the public.
These ideas are still formulating and won't be tangible to the extent I
would like for a little while, but I plan to focus much more on trees.
***********************************************
Amazing....another wonderfully creative spirit who calls TheHiveNYC 'home'.
...my thanks to Mariana for her words about 'Artists in NYC' and The Hive, and the amazing founder of it..... Yula Beeri...and it's life's blood, Jason Yellen.
follow:: Mariana at:: Cirque Squelettique
.........to see all the others in this series, type 'Artists in New York' in the search box.
follow me:: Pete Carma
. 
