He’s Got Baby Fever: A Trans Choreographer’s Surrogacy Journey

In “prettygirl264264” (2018), the choreographer Ashley R.T. Yergens threw himself a funeral.

It was absurd, and funny, with an “In Loving Memory” card in lieu of a program, and an a cappella rendition of Celine Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.”

But it was also a dark meditation on how transgender people can be treated, even in death. “It was connected to this question of, How will I be remembered?” said Yergens, 32, who is trans. “Will I get to have a funeral in the way that other people get to be remembered?”

Yergens’s latest work, “Surrogate,” premiering this week at New York Live Arts, contains another premature life-cycle event: a birthday party for a frozen embryo. There is darkness under the surface here, too, as there often is in work by the Brooklyn-based Yergens, whose brash, irreverent dances are stuffed with obscure pop-culture references and virtuosic movement equally inspired by the postmodern tradition and the queer nightclub.

Top left, Justin Faircloth; bottom left, Faircloth partnering Maddie Schimmel; right, Nicola Gorham, who plays a mean, tell-it-like-it-is therapist.

During the course of making this new work, Yergens, who recently froze 24 embryos — his eggs and an anonymous donor’s sperm — saw his parenthood journey with a surrogate end, and watched as a state Supreme Court ruling in Alabama (later essentially made ineffective by new legislation) threatened the future of I.V.F.

“That birthday celebration,” Yergens said, “comes from a real fear of, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to have a kid in this way.’”