Photo by Frank Sperling. Alexis Blake, Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve (2023), at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

For the High Line, Blake presents a new iteration of her work, Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve, which takes up glass and breaking as metaphors for the fragility and strength of the individual and collective body. Both an installation and a performance, the work starts with sheets of glass nestled in moveable steel bases. The performers, who are a percussionist, two sound artists, and four dancers coming from different dance genres such as breakdance, hip hop, contemporary, ballet, West African, and tap, activate the glass to explore transparency, resistance, resonance, and breaking—breaking free from constraints and liberating oneself from the confinement of oppression. Presented at TENT in Rotterdam in 2019 and KW Institute for Contemporary Art in February 2023, Blake’s work on the High Line will mark the work’s US premiere and the artist’s first performance in New York City.

On the High Line, Blake’s work engages with dance practices born in New York City, as well as the architecture of the surrounding buildings, pointing to the brick factories and warehouses newly replaced with glass-and-steel skyscrapers and residential buildings. Blake takes the crew’s varying forms of expression as a starting point for collaboratively probing how to learn from, come close to, and empathize with one another. However, they aim not to appropriate each other’s sonic and body language. Rather, they use the glass as a tool to communicate, break patterns, and collectively give rise to a new vocabulary of sound and movement, albeit without losing their subjectivity.

This performance takes place in a covered passage and happens rain or shine.