The Wallach Art Gallery presents Hot Hands, a performance conceived and choreographed by the artist Madeline Hollander in conjunction with the exhibition Growing Sideways: Performing Childhood. Hot Hands features six dancers and draws choreographic inspiration from the reflex-driven hand game of its title, as well as other archetypal clapping games found across the globe. The collaborative piece taps into the dancers’ muscle memories and childhoods, and playfully explores the corporeal vocabularies articulating fake-outs, flinches, anticipation, concentration, keeping score, and breaking rules. The installation presents 6 locally sourced inverted tables that have been converted into “roundabouts,” a revolving piece of playground equipment. These spinning structures inform the dancers’ trajectories, with arrows indicating their next move as they cycle through the game ad infinitum.

Free to the public. Viewers are invited to come and go as they please throughout the performance.

Performers: Eloise Deluca, Marielis Garcia, Peter Mazurowski, Frances Samson, Vinicius Silva
Understudy: Lauren Newman
Co-produced by ARCH Athens

Growing Sideways: Performing Childhood is curated by Piper Marshall and on view at The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery through September 15.

Madeline Hollander is an artist and choreographer who works with performance, video and installation to explore how human movement and body-language negotiate their limits within everyday systems of technology, intellectual property law, and ritual. Hollander assembles movement and environments to compose sequences that investigate the formation of new body languages, quotidian gestures, social behavior, and spectacle. Hollander has exhibited works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (2023); Performa’s 2021 Biennial, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Aldrich Museum, Connecticut; The Artists’ Institute, NY; The Park Avenue Armory, NY; Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover, Germany; the Serpentine Galleries, Londons, UK; Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA; Gagosian, New York; Bosse & Baum Gallery, London, UK; Helsinki Contemporary, Helsinki, Finland; Galeria Zmud, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Socrates Sculpture Park, NY; Bortolami Gallery, NY; Signal, NY; Luxembourg & Dayan Gallery, NY; the Sculpture Center, NY; Jack Hanley Gallery, NY; Tina Kim Gallery, NY; The Kitchen, NY; Torrance Shipman Gallery, NY; and the Centre Pompidou Metz, France (2019). She choreographed two ballets, “5 Live Calibrations” and “Elastic Ballet,” for Los Angeles Dance Project in Los Angeles, that premiered at the Theatre Champs-Elysees, Paris, and the Louvre, Abu Dhabi. Hollander received her MFA in Film/Video from the Milton Avery School of Arts, Bard College in 2018.