Join us Friday, May 22 at 5 pm on Facebook Live for a pre-recorded conversation featuring two giants of the performing arts world! David Roussève, highly-acclaimed choreographer and leader of dance company REALITY, joins Kyle Abraham, star dancer and leader of the trail-blazing dance company A.I.M., in a discussion revealing each artist's frustrations and inspirations that come from being trapped at home during a time of global crisis. **Tune into the conversation on Friday, May 22 at 5 pm CDT on the CAC's Facebook page at ** facebook.com/contemporaryartscenterneworleans This conversation is part of Conversance, the CAC's online conversation series in which artists near and dear to the CAC have intimate dialogues about art, artistic practice, and performance. About David Roussève: Choreographer/writer/director/filmmaker David Roussève has written, directed, and choreographed 14 full evening works for David Roussève/REALITY including three commissions for the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “Halfway to Dawn”, Roussève’s most recent work for REALITY explores the life and music of jazz composer Billy Strayhorn. The evening-length work premiered in October 2018 at REDCAT in Los Angeles prior to national touring that includes REALITY’s return to the Next Wave Festival. Roussève’s commissions for other companies include Ballet Hispanico (in collaboration with salsa great Eddie Palmieri), Dancing Wheels (a reimagining of “Dumbo” set amongst high school bullying), Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Theater, Atlanta Ballet (with a live performance by the 100-member Morehouse College Glee Club), Houston Ballet (danced to a live playing of “Appalachian Spring” and set in a Houston High School during 1970’s desegregation), Dance Alloy (in collaboration with Ysaye Barnwell of Sweet Honey in the Rock), and Ilkhom Theater Company of Tashkent, Uzbekistan where Roussève spent six weeks creating an evening-length work surrounding the homoerotic art of Russian painter Usto Mumin. About Kyle Abraham 2013 MacArthur Fellow, KYLE ABRAHAM, began his dance training at the Civic Light Opera Academy and the Creative and Performing Arts High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He continued his dance studies in New York, receiving a BFA from SUNY Purchase and an MFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. In 2012, Abraham was named the 2012 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award recipient and 2012 USA Ford Fellow. In 2014, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater premiered Abraham’s newest work, "Another Night at New York’s City Center to rave reviews." Rebecca Bengal of Vogue writes, “What Abraham brings to Ailey is an avant-garde aesthetic, a original and politically minded downtown sensibility that doesn’t distinguish between genres but freely draws on a vocabulary that is as much Merce and Martha as it is Eadweard Muybridge and Michael Jackson.” Abraham received a prestigious Bessie Award for Outstanding Performance in Dance for his work in The Radio Show, and a Princess Grace Award for Choreography in 2010. The previous year, he was selected as one of Dance Magazine’s 25 To Watch for 2009, and received a Jerome Travel and Study Grant in 2008. In 2011, OUT Magazine labeled Abraham as the “best and brightest creative talent to emerge in New York City in the age of Obama.”