Pillow Lab:
Larissa Velez-Jackson (Yackez)

Pillow Lab:
Larissa Velez-Jackson (Yackez)

Residency: March 27-April 5, 2023
Showing: April 1, 2023

For this project, Yackez Love For A New World Paradigm, Larissa returns to directing and choreographing Yackez, her collaboration with her husband, musical director Jon Velez-Jackson. This work redefines family-friendly entertainment with an inclusive performance installation of live acoustic healing instruments, original digital-based sound and living sculpture by Yackez. This project also highlights a new direction of Yackez, where emphasis is placed upon telling their story of healing and changed perspectives by way of their experience of illness and disability. The immersive environment is meant for the audience to experience the show as they wish as sculptural elements—like their foam mascot, Yacky—come alive.

Yackez, aka the world’s most lovable art-pop duo, is the multimedia collaboration of Larissa and Jon Velez-Jackson. As Culturebot wrote of the duo, they are “so beloved and so natural in their campy stage antics they seem to defy what it means to perform absurdity at all times.” Jon is a songwriter, writer and full-time journalist. Larissa (LVJ) is a New York-based choreographer, movement educator and multi-platform artist. She is also an older adult fitness specialist who has incorporated older non-dancers in her and Yackez’s intergenerational projects. LVJ was nominated for a 2016 New York Dance and Performance Bessie award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer and received a 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grant to Artists Award.