Torn Space Theater

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018

II Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1719193153

Contemporary Performance 105 West 10th St. #3 New York, NY 10011 contemporaryperformance.com

Front Cover Photo: Maria Apleri for KOR’SIA

Back Photo: Setty McIntosh

III IV V Note From The Editors:

Welcome to the 5th annual edition of the Contemporary Performance Almanac. We’re thrilled that the community of Contemporary Performance—both the online network and the larger performance world—has responded with such enthusi- asm to this ongoing project. From the overwhelming response to the first annual edition, we’ve been spurred on by the positive feedback from the contributors and readers of the book. It’s exciting to see artists returning with new work and to see new contributors to the collection.

Our motivation for the creation of this project remains the same: So often presenters do not have access to artists and works that haven’t traveled outside their city or country of origin, and artists do not have access to survey the work of peers that might be working in sympathetic modalities. Contemporary Performance sees a need to give artists, presenters, and others in the field an opportunity to start new working relationships. We hope that this Almanac—as an extension of the Network—can meet that need, and to aid discovery, spark curiosity, and facilitate exchange.

We’re continually excited to see the breadth of disciplines practiced by the participants and the global scope of the contributions. Inside the pages of this Almanac are the artworks described by the artists in their own words: eloquent, challenging, provocative and urgent. Enjoy.

-Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson

Participate in the next Contemporary Performance Almanac 2019 by submitting your work online at https://contemporaryperformance.com/almanac19

VI VII About Contemporary Performance Network:

The Contemporary Performance Network is a social network and community organizing platform providing artists, presenters, scholars and festivals a space to meet, share work, and collaborate. The term contemporary performance is used to describe hybrid performance works and artists that travel between the fields of experimental theatre & dance, video art, visual art, music composition and performance art without adhering to one specific field’s practice. The Network was founded in 2010 and has grown to 7600 artists, presenters, curators, foundations, scholars and publishers from 85 countries world wide.

As artists, we began to tour internationally with Big Art Group in 2001. Some of our most meaningful experiences have been the personal encounters that we’ve made with audiences and with other artists through the years, and we wanted to take that experience of the festival “artist’s tent”— a meeting place to have informal conversation, exchange ideas, and compare notes — and recreate it for a global network, in order to bring more people under its canopy and ignite more discussion. We’ve been thrilled with the response.

The Network continues to grow, evolve and adapt. As we are experimentalists ourselves, we are always looking for new ways to leverage technology, discover fresh communication strategies and play with form. In the process, we are continually learning and encountering surprises of our own as the Network changes. We couldn’t have done it without the support of family, friends and colleagues who provided encouragement and patience through the process, and to them we say thank you. And we thank above all the community of the Contemporary Performance Network for their participation and spirit, whose creativity daily inspires us and to whom this book is dedicated.

Join the network at www.contemporaryperformance.org

VIII IX Table of Contents

X 3 Pony Show / Keila Cordova (Philadelphia, USA) 3 ACT Natimuk (Natimuk, Australia) 5 Adelheid|Female Economy & Zina (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) 7 Alexander Borinsky/Rustchuk Farm (Brooklyn, USA) 9 Almanac Dance Circus Theatre (Philadelphia, USA) 11 Alyssa Gersony (New York City, USA) 13 Andressa Furletti (Brooklyn, USA) 15 Anna-Helena McLean (Moon Fool International Theatre and Music Exchange) (London, UK) 17 anna.laclaque (Braunschweig, Germany) 19 Anne-Flore de Rochambeau (Montreal, Canada) 21 Arturas Bumšteinas (Vilnius, Lithuania) 23 Aurora Fradella (Prague, Rep. Ceca) 25 Bak Artes Performativas / Bak Performing Arts (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) 27 Bandelion / Dandelion Dancetheater (Oakland, USA) 29 Benjamin Kahn & Cherish Menzo (Belgium, Belgium) 31 Blackbird Dance - Oiseau Noir Danse (New York City, USA) 33 Blavatsky Society (Prague, Czech Republic) 35 Carron Little (Chicago, USA) 37 Charlotte Brathwaite (New York City, USA) 39 Company Divisar - Mehdi Duman (Geneva, Switzerland) 41 Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company (New York City, USA) 43 de serpa soares/sussman/white (Berlin, Germany) 45 Deborah Slater (San Francisco, USA) 47 Julia Rosa Peer (Innsbruck, Austria) 49 DLT Experience (Toronto, Canada) 51 Elif Sezen (Melbourne, Australia) 53 Fabio Bonelli (Milano, Italy) 55 Fernando Calzadilla (Miami, USA) 57 Flam Chen (Tucson, USA) 59 Gabrielle Civil (Columbus, OH, USA) 61 Hannes Egger (Bolzano, Italy) 63 HARTMANNMUELLER (Düsseldorf, Germany) 65 HECTOR CANONGE (New York City, USA) 67 Hung Dance (Kaohsiung, Taiwan) 69 Jadi Carboni and Burkhard Beins (Berlin, Germany) 71 Jesse Glass (Shin-Urayasu, Japan) 73 Jørgen Frederik Scheel Haarstad (Oslo, Norway) 75 Katerina Drakopoulou (Athens, Greece) 77 KOR’SIA (Madrid, Spain) 79 Logan K. Young (Washington, D.C., USA) 81 Lucia August/EveryBody Can Dance (Oakland, USA) 83 Luminarium Dance Company (Boston, MA, U.S.A.) 85 MA•ZE (Budapest, Hungary) 87 Maladype Theatre (Budapest, Hungary) 89 Mark Rautenbach (Cape Town, South Africa) 91 Mary Pearson / Mpearsonater (Liverpool, UK) 93 Meridian (Nanaimo, BC, Canada) 95 Molissa Fenley and Company (New York City, USA) 97 Molly Joyce (Pittsburgh, USA) 99 Nettles Artists Collective (New York NY, USA) 101 Nettles Artists Collective (New York City, USA) 103 NINO MAGLAKELIDZE - SHEETS & CARL (TBILISI, GEORGIA) 105 Noemi Veberičç Levovnik (Berlin, Germany) 107 OHT | Office for a Human Theatre (Rovereto, Italy) 109 Opera del Espacio (Los Angeles, USA) 111 Orlando Cela (Arlington, United States) 113 Pam Tzeng (Calgary, Canada) 115 PartSuspended - Hari Marini (London, UK) 117 Patrick S. Ford (Hong Kong, PRC.) 119 Pepper Pepper (Portland Oregon, USA) 121 Praba Pilar (Dystopia, USA) 123 Priscila Rezende (Belo Horizonte, Brasil) 125 Przemek Kamiński (Berlin, Germany) 127 Rachel Karp (New York City, USA) 129 Rainer Pagel (Belfast, UK- Northern Ireland) 131 Rareş Augustin Crăiuţ (Brussels, Belgium) 133 Riccardo Matlakas (London, UK) 135 Sachie Mikawa (Los Angeles, USA) 137 Samantha Shay / Source Material (Reykjavik, Iceland) 139 Sandro Masai (Aalborg, Denmark) 141 Sanna Kekäläinen (Helsinki, Finland) 143 Sirje Aleksandra Viise (Berlin, Germany) 145 sisu&company (Hamburg, Germany) 147 smorenberg/santarciel (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) 149 SPECTROLAB (Cuiabá, Brazil) 151 Stevarius / Steven Van Nuffelen (Antwerp, Belgium) 153 Strada Company (Tucson, USA) 155 The Actors Studio Seni Teater Rakyat (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) 157 The Ghost Road Company (Los Angeles, USA) 159 The Kaizen M.D. (Singapore, Singapore) 161 The Nerve Tank (New York City, USA) 163 Theatre Gargantua (Toronto, Canada) 165 Theatre of Heavy Clouds (Milwaukee, USA) 167 Theatre Smith-Gilmour (Toronto, Canada) 169 Tiarma Dame Ruth Sirait (Bandung, Indonesia) 171 Torn Space Theater (Buffalo, USA) 173 Veronika Nicolaeva (Moscow, Russia) 175 Vikram Iyengar / Ranan (Calcutta, India) 177 William Skaleski (Milwaukee, USA) 179 Wolf 359 (New York City, USA) 181 Xandra Ibarra (Oakland, United States) 183 XOXO (Charlotte, North Carolina, USA) 185 XV Artists and Companies

Photo: Kathryn Raines, Plate 3 (top) & Still from video by Mike Williams DigitalFirst Photography (bottom) 3 3 Pony Show / Keila Cordova (Philadelphia, USA)

I’m interested in our bodies as cargo ships of memory, of love and loss, trauma, joy, poetry, comedy and drama. I wish to create language out of bodies and probe the hidden discourse in our physicality to understand our human story.

Keila Cordova is a choreographer, performer and writer whose works have been performed at Phila- delphia Fringe Festivals, in NYC at Judson Church, Harlem Stage, Dixon Place, Boogie Down Dance Festival/BAAD!, D.U.M.B.O. Festival, HERE Arts Center as well as newMoves (Pittsburgh, PA), Grounds for Sculpture (NJ) and festivals in San Diego, Chicago and Toronto. She’s received artistic support from Small But Mighty Arts, the Leeway and Puffin Foundations, Funds for New Work awards from Harlem Stage, the Greenwall Foundation; artist residency awards from Constance B. Saltonstall Foundation, Millay Colony, Norcroft and an Audre Lorde Fellowship. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing (New School) and has taught movement workshops in Philadelphia, New York City, Pittsburgh and Atlanta.

It’s an important time to be an artist. The will of the artist for truth telling, bringing an “outsider” perspective on the human condition, is an urgent task; no small feat. I am influenced by the rhythm in the spaces between words, the poetry of the body and the mutability of the human narrative. How do we get along? How do people connect? We can’t be afraid of honesty, of what is in our hearts. Simple. Clear. Flow.

Disciplines: Performance, Dance, Theatre, Choreography, Storytelling, Improvisation KITH Our Body is a Road Map. Hear Our Story.

KITH is a 60-minute dance theatre work that tells a shared story of our relationships, our bonds. I distributed a short survey, inviting people to share their own stories of connection; creating potential opportunities for people to see their personal experiences of family and friends brought to life onstage as part of a collective experience, examining our personal connections, developing and bringing those explorations into the performance space, with dance, music, text and song.

”In KITH, 3 PONY SHOW/keila cordova dances explores kinship through the metaphor of stars pulled together by the power of gravitational attraction. Six dancers swirl and spiral around each other in a tight cluster, which moves in a wide arc from downstage right to far upstage center, as if they are hurling together through space. They revolve, affect, propel, and shift by curling their spines through a gap between an arm and leg, or leaning into contact to ground a reach. This cluster moves across the stage as I imagine a giant ball of stars must move together in space.

”3 PONY SHOW/keila cordova dances… artfully balances a state of constant movement with sus- tained presence. Fusing movement scores with a music compilation of old folk songs, bluesy guitar rhythms, and nostalgic piano, KITH leaves a feeling of appreciation for the expansive constellation of stars within and around a single human experience—the truth of which can only be encountered through the constant gravitational push and pull of the people in our lives.” Janna Meiring, Thinking Dance

Production History: Conwell Dance Theatre, Philadelphia, PA Video: https://vimeo.com/237307491 Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.keilacordova.com

@3ponyshow https://www.facebook.com/3ponyshow Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 4 5 Photo: Michelle MacFarlane ACT Natimuk (Natimuk, Australia)

Natimuk is a small town (600 people) in the wheat farming area of Western Victoria, Australia and for the last 15 years a group of artists there have been collaborating on large spectacular performance events that utilises local iconic architecture, aerial dance, shadow play and interactive projection.

Natimuk artists have been using the local Silos as their personal theatre and making spectacular performance art in Western Victoria. They have taken their skills to many places in Australia, and international locations in Europe and Asia.

Through the many years of working together in a variety of collaborative combinations, these Natimuk artists have developed a unique visual language that involves interactive animation and projections, aerial performance, live shadow play, puppetry, music (mass choir/opera/orchestra), community performance and storytelling.

From this, Natimuk artists have also developed a rich ethos of community co-creation.

The expression of our desire to make large scale performance became a great example of how such projects can engage communities, leading to social cohesion, and a heightened sense of pride of place. In the process, we worked out that we were good at, and enjoyed, the public engagement part of these projects.

The core artists are Jillian Pearce, Y Space Artistic Director, Dave Jones, Animation and Digital Projec- tion Director, Mary French, Shadow Director, Greg Pritchard, Producer/ Shadow artist and a team of Y Space riggers and aerial performers. All of them have successful individual artistic careers in a variety of disciplines

Disciplines: Performance, Multi-disciplinary, Theatre, Aerialists, Projection, Community Dusk Dusk is a spectacular celebratory performance event that utilises local iconic architecture, aerial dance, shadow play and interactive projection. Dusk takes our unique visual language and puts it in the hands of the community to co-create a performance that changes each evening to reflect their experience of their day at their festival. It involves interactive animation and projections, aerial performance, live shadow play, puppetry, music (mass choir/opera/orchestra), community performance and storytelling. It can involve local artists collaborating with the Dusk Team. To this we add a rich musical score, working in unison with local musicians and choirs, and images gathered through workshops and research. In addition, the clever lighting design will create an intricate balance between the architecture of an iconic structure and the interactive projection, aerial, shadow and community performance elements. Whilst this is the latest version of the large shows we have created using the local wheat silos as our personal theatre, the model has been successfully toured to other places and played to audiences of up to 5000 people. Part of our process is to collaborate with the community where we make the work and they and their friends then become our most enthusiastic audience members. This spectacular show is a great outdoor event to make your festival come alive.

Production History: Nati Frinj Biennale Video: https://vimeo.com/user17034663 Contact: [email protected] Website: http://madeinnatimuk.com

@madeinnatimuk https://www.facebook.com/NatiFrinj/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 6 7 Photo: Bastiaan Heus Adelheid|Female Economy & Zina (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

Adelheid Roosen, artistic leader of Adelheid|Female Economy and Zina. Dutch theatre maker Adelheid Roosen’s work is best described as multidimensional social sculptures. Utilizing primarily theatrical methods, she creates performances and installations in places of great social vulnerability, which have a sensitive eye for daily circumstance as well as offering a perspective to experience the beauty of an unfettered existence. Roosen’s work is intertwined with the search for the Other. It is not an attempt to understand the stranger. Instead, she tilts the perspective in an attempt to demonstrate that there is in fact no stranger at all. As a tangible image, her sculptures are concrete, touchable and breathing in front of the audience. Roosen ‘lives’ with her projects in her art. Literally. Her immersive and intimate approach, with both professional actors and neighborhood residents, make her a pioneer in the Dutch theatre scene. Nothing is taboo in Roosen’s theater and film productions: honor killings, migrant issues, domestic violence, female sexuality in the Islamic world, her mother’s Alzheimer’s, everything can and must be explored and presented publicly. The Humanist Society awarded Roosen the Van Praag Prize (2009) and she received the Amsterdam Prize (2012) for her “trans-boundary contribution to the arts.” In 2017 Roosen won the LPTW Gilder/Coigney International Theatre Award (USA) for ‘demonstrating artistic excellence and support of women’s work and issues, which inspires and educates across cultures’.

Disciplines: Theatre, Performance Art, Social Sculpture, Installation, Film, Music UrbanSafari How well do we know our neighbours? Those who we live among, but have a different religion, cultural background or ethnic origin? The UrbanSafari is a journey into homes and lives. It is an intimate encounter with people you wouldn’t normally meet in the course of your daily life.

The creation of UrbanSafari, by Adelheid Roosen, finds it source in the development of an individual’s uncultivated capacity for empathy in relation to ‘the Other’. The exploration of this capacity begins by overcoming shame and awkwardness and the forgotten human ability to knock on each other’s door. And thus Roosen and her team of professional actors make that step to literally live for several weeks, including staying overnight, with local residents in their homes. To deepen the contact and to collect their life stories. Roosen calls this ‘the adoption method’. No distinction is made between religious experience, financial muscle, or composition of skin pigmentation. The equal and creative collision of life scenario’s, of both the actor as the local resident, form the mainstay of the performance.

UrbanSafari is an immersive adventure into unfamiliar territory that has the power to challenge perceptions and overcome prejudices permanently.

The concept has become a successful export model – with four versions made in the Netherlands and three made internationally. UrbanSafari was selected by the World Cities Culture Forum as a “transformational” project because of its power to change attitudes, increase interaction between communities and to reach new audiences. Production History: UrbanSafari has been in performed in the following neighborhoods and cities: Slotermeer|Amsterdam, Overvecht,Ondiep&Zuilen|Utrecht, Bijlmer|Amsterdam, Tepito|Mexico-City, Noord|Amsterdam and Ciudad Juarez (city on the border of USA & Mexico Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbvna5Lei1I&list=PL8P-BXRW9AtRx2nnk_ mBECUQoXoqgPMC1&index=1 Contact: [email protected] Website: https://www.femaleeconomy.nl

@zinaplatform https://www.facebook.com/adelheidroosen.femaleeconomy Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 8 9 Photo: Matthew Fenelon Alexander Borinsky/Rustchuk Farm (Brooklyn, USA)

Rustchuk Farm a made-up farm that is the home of theater-maker Alexander Borinsky.

We make plays and live performance that are strange, exploratory, inclusive, and invigorating. Experiments in art that are also experiments in living together.

We’re interested in how people gather. We’re interested in how people look at each other and listen to each other. We’re talking about the stuff that might happen in a performance. We’re also talking about the stuff that might happen in a room where a performance is happening. And that’s sort of the point.

What if choices about art were also choices about how we want to be in the world? Can the work we make be connected to the world we make?

Alexander Borinsky is a writer and performer, based in Brooklyn. His plays have been produced and developed by Clubbed Thumb, Playwrights Horizons, Target Margin, Page 73, Ensemble Studio Theatre, SPACE at Ryder Farm, Masrah Ensemble in Beirut, Rady&Bloom, HERE Arts Center, Up- stream Theater in St. Louis, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and his writing has appeared in n+1, The Brooklyn Rail, and HowlRound. A 2014-2015 LMCC Workspace resident, Alex was a member of the emerging playwrights’ group Youngblood from 2010 to 2016. As a collaborating performer, he has appeared at BAM, PS122, and 3LD. He has performed and developed his own work in basements, backyards, bars, circus tents, and theaters, and is grateful for ongoing collaborations with visual artists, choreographers, and composers. MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College.

Disciplines: Gatherings, Plays, Dance, Potlucks, Ceremonies, Essays Weird Classrooms Weird Classrooms is a plaything. You can pick it up in your hand and turn it over. It is an ongoing way of working, a framework for an assembly of humans, both prepared-performers and unprepared audience members.

Wherever it touches down, it builds relationships. It asks questions, it listens, it takes the shape of the people who assemble to bring it into being. It exists in conversation with a room, with a building, with a city, with memories and desires.

In November 2016, I started a residency at University Settlement, a 130-year-old community center in NYC, with the intention of exploring experimental education. I ended up leading Sunday dance classes. It was “dance for writers” and then it was dance for everybody. Instead of writing, I moved around with other people. We wiggled and talked and explored what it might mean to know things as bodies, and not just as brains.

In November 2017 we turned this year of exploration into an afternoon’s experience for an audience. People arrived, put their things in cubbies. I danced a little, gave a little context. A poem-invocation. Introductions. And then all of us – audience and performers – made a circle on the floor and started in on an art project. By the end we had sung, baked bread, philosophized, danced, watched, listened, made messes, paid attention to the light change at sunset. Everyone had permission always to abstain. No feelings or attitudes were enforced.

Somehow, the culture in the room changed. Weird Classrooms is ongoing. It can touch down any- where.

Production History: University Settlement, NYC Video: https://vimeo.com/243980771 Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.rustchukfarm.org

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 10 11 Photo: Daniel Kontz Almanac Dance Circus Theatre (Philadelphia, USA)

Almanac Dance Circus Theatre is Philadelphia’s award-winning acrobatic performance company. Founded in 2013, ADCT charges beyond traditional circus practice to the frontier of contemporary physical performance by combining partner acrobatics, somatic dance, and a rigorous approach to acting to share an entirely new vision for the power of live performance that defies categorization. Over the past five years, ADCT has produced eight full-length works for the stage, performed over two hundred improvised street performances, and taught more than ten thousand school children through their educational outreach program focused on curiosity, risk-taking and cooperation. With a radical commitment to non-hierarchical leadership, ADCT believes our vision for the world should be reflected in the ways we make art, so Almanac’s ensemble of ten performers creates each work from scratch through a process of collective creation that uses as its primary provocation: what can we create together that we can’t create apart?

Disciplines: Dance, Circus, Theatre, Acrobatics, Physical Theatre, Ensemble Devised Theatre

Leaps of Faith and Other Mistakes

“We, the Seafarers, start a new world together and offer our thanks to the Sea and to the Sky and to our fellow Seafarers for our Purity of Purpose.” So goes the daily refrain of the four protagonists in Leaps of Faith and Other Mistakes, at once both a cautionary tale of the dangers of blind faith and a shining example of sublime harmony through radical trust. Leaps of Faith follows four friends as they set sail for the open ocean in search of spiritual revelation, hoping that isolation and rigorous acrobatic practice will purify their bodies for a vision of how best to live in peace. However, when food grows scarce, tensions rise, and storms begin to rage, doubt creeps aboard and the Seafarers must find a way to believe in each other once again or perish in the depths of the sea. Originally performed in a 3/4 thrust seating configuration, but adaptable to a one-sided proscenium, Leaps of Faith is best performed on a deep stage reminiscent of the long deck of a ship and in close proximity to the audience so they have the opportunity to feel the intimacy of the collaboration and the danger of the journey. Leaps of Faith was the third full-length piece that Almanac made, but the first with spoken text, demonstrating the company’s commitment to blending circus and theatre genres, and in 2017 the company remounted LoF with a new director of contemporary dance to infuse the piece with greater reverence for visual composition and narrative arc. As a semi-autobiographical dramatization of Alma- nac’s company philosophy, Leaps of Faith is a breath-taking vista into vulnerability.

Production History: New York City: Skirball Center | Philadelphia: Fleisher Art Memorial; Painted Bride Arts Center | New Orleans: Old Iron Works

Video: https://vimeo.com/almanacus

Contact: [email protected]

Website: https://www.thealmanac.us

@almanac_us https://www.facebook.com/almanacdct Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 12 13 Photo: Lívia Sá Alyssa Gersony (New York City, USA)

“Gersony draws on her agility and strength to portray the living fight within a body in captivity and under siege. At times, that unmistakable life flares, equally disturbing and impressive. “ — Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Alyssa Gersony is a Queens-based artist making contemporary dance in New York City since 2013. Her work has been presented by Movement Research at the Judson Church, Gibney Dance, the Center for Performance Research, Dixon Place, Triskelion Arts, Green Space, and the Actors Fund Art Center. She is currently a research apprentice with Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, and a company member with ChrisMastersDance. Alyssa holds a BFA in Dance and a BA in Interdisciplinary Performance from Arizona State University. She has worked as an assistant choreographer to Thomas Lehmen and collaborated on new works under the direction of Moya Michael, Cristian Duarte, Liz Lerman, Eileen Standley and Grisha Coleman.

I make performance work that shares personal, social and geographic histories with audiences. The dances I make are presented in public spaces, formal dance spaces, and galleries, ranging from 10 minutes to 2 hours in duration. In my creative practice I value the tools of indeterminacy, virtuosity and transparency. I use thematic choreographic scores to both shape and develop compositional structure, and allow socially engaged topics to pair with dreamscapes both in live text, sound and costume. My works provoke dialogue around aesthetics, inclusion, performance history and vulnerability.

Disciplines: Dance, Interdisciplinary, Performance, Theater, Social Art Practice WATCHING THE CLOCK

“but... how do you feel fear?”

“as a liquid weight that obsesses me, finds it’s way in a dream, and turns.”

WATCHING THE CLOCK is a solo performance project inspired by the poetic and visual art work of Surrealist artists Kay Sage, Simone Yoyotte, and Sheila Legge. Through rigorous physical interroga- tion with handmade masks, puppets and props, Gersony juxtaposes fragmented performance histories with lived, visceral conflict. She confronts notions of failure and control embedded in her personal history, while reaching for states of psychoanalytic embodiment as a means to transcend fear.

This 40-minute, interdisciplinary work serves as a metacommentary on European-aesthetics in contemporary dance, childhood trauma, and self-coercion. Set for a proscenium stage presentation, WATCHING THE CLOCK takes audiences on a journey of episodic and unforgiving memory.

Described by audiences as “an explosively psychedelic - yet disarmingly human experience” WATCH- ING THE CLOCK serves as a meditation on time, questioning the very moment we live in.

Production History: Movement Research at the Judson Church (2018), Dixon Place (2017), Triskel- ion Arts (2017)

Video: https://vimeo.com/user6916548 Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.alyssagersony.com/

@agersony

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 14 15 Photo: Livia Sá Andressa Furletti (Brooklyn, USA)

Originally from Brazil, Andressa Furletti is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York. She is the co-founder and artistic director of Group .BR, NY’s only Brazilian theater company (www.group. br.com). Her artistic works include stage and film acting, performance art, art installation, photography, and filmmaking. Her inspiration comes from her degrees in Biology and Filmmaking, and the acting conservatory training at Stella Adler Studio. She has participated in many workshops and inten- sives, such as the Mitu Thailand Artist Intensive in Bangkok and the Watermill International Sum- mer Program (2011/2012) coordinated by Robert Wilson. Her work tends to explore and respond to contemporary social issues by revealing hidden aspects of human behavior and other unseen patterns.

Andressa received several awards including Best Multimedia Show at the United Solo Festival in New York for her debut solo theater show free•dom - a solo of many people, the Outstanding Community Service Award from the Brazilian Community Heritage Foundation, 5 awards in international film festivals for Separation Sonnet, nine nominations for her performances and artistic creations, and the Best Actress Award (2017) from the Brazilian International Press Awards.

Andressa’s recent works include the play Inside the Wild Heart, an immersive theatrical experience based on the works of Clarice Lispector that premiered in NYC in 2016, the performance Yes, All Women about the alarming number of women that have suffered sexual assault, also presented in NYC in 2016, and the performance #TakeASelfieOnMe.

Disciplines: Performance Art, Multidisciplinary Arts

#TakeASelfieOnMe

The social phenomenon of “taking a selfie” has provided the opportunity for Andressa to collaborate with her audience in a new way. As people increasingly view the world through their phone screens, the way they interact with art is abstracted.The omnipresence of social media implies that unless you document your experiences, they didn’t really happen. The desire to capture and share the experience is becoming stronger than the desire to witness and/or actively participate.This wave cannot be avoided, or ignored. Instead, the artist seeks to investigate and reveal.

#TakeASelfieOnMe features the artist, dressed in a mirrored costume, engaging with the audience in a public space. Whether the viewer is aware of it or not, every photo they take of the art is a selfie. If they look intently, they find distorted images of themselves looking back at them. Using slow and nearly continuous movement, the reflected images are dynamic, allowing the viewer an opportunity to see themselves and their environments in new and different ways. This is a direct dialogue with an audience whose phones may otherwise detract from their participation in a work of art.

Production History: New York, Miami, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Burning Man (2015 and 2017), Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Ouro Preto (Brazil).

Video: https://vimeo.com/148426167

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.andressa.art

https://www.facebook.com/andressafurletti Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 16 17 Photo: Clive Tagg Anna-Helena McLean (Moon Fool International Theatre and Music Exchange) (London, UK)

Previous work includes Song of the Goat’s Chronicles a Lamentation working with Grzegorz Bral before joining Gardzienice.

Core ensemble member in Awake Projects with Song of the Goat’s Christopher Sivertsen and Maria Sendow 2006-2013.

Developed Moon Fool with Christopher Sivertsen and Ian Morgan of Song of the Goat 2007-2013, generating an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with producers Trestle and Natalie Richardson, touring nationally under title ‘ill met by moonlight’.

Worked with Peter Swaffer-Reynolds, Musical Director of NoFit State Circus on ‘ill met by moonlight’ and later on Titania. Movement for Titania developed together with Sophie Bortolussi, lead actress from Punchdrunk (Sleep no More, Drowned Man).

Moon Fool operates through international exchange to combine Eastern and Western theatre practices in devising original music, movement and text based performance and practice. With 8 works in repertoire, each with its unique training and scale (King Lear, Romeo & Juliet, Richard III, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tem- pest) - branching adult, youth, able and disabled works, community work and professional practice, national and international tours - and an original ensemble training approach (ACT) forming modules at leading educational institutes Royal Conservatoire of Scotland 2006-2013, Yale New Haven USA, NSD Delhi and DePaul Chicago:

“An international company that has fused together a unique theatrical practice proven groundbreaking and world class” Head of Graduate Acting

Moon Fool makes infectious, sexy and meaningful contemporary music-theatre.

Disciplines: Physical Theatre, Music, Ensemble, Cabaret, Classical, Circus Titania - A Solo Cabaret

An innovative re-imagining of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed and created by renowned international theatre practitioner Anna-Helena McLean, formerly a principal performer with Poland’s legendary Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices. This intoxicating one-woman performance promises to be an engaging, funny, sensual and participatory event. The much-loved queen of the night plays out events from her past, hosting nightly revelries in an attempt to woo audiences off the path and back into the woods. A heady fusion of original music and vocal acrobatics, Titania is the Queen of the Faeries’ tale with an amplified twist.

Creator and performer Anna-Helena McLean says: “This solo is fresh and surprising every time. My work is predominantly ensemble based, completely live and acoustic. But Titania’s fairies are acrobats of an electronic nature, conjuring an immersive total theatre world predominantly through sound. This highly in demand, easy to tour, cabaret style production marks a stepping stone toward the complete marriage of multi media, electronic sound and physical ensemble performance that my new work in progress aims to premiere...”

Musical Theatre Network Award Nominated 2015 “Tour-de-force” - Total Theatre Mag; “Shakespeare by way of Fiona Apple” -The Skinny; “Totally absorbing to watch and marvellous to hear” -BroadwayBaby; “Wild and Thrilling”- British Theatre Guide; “Soars in glorious aural technicolour. Her musicality is magical” -The Herald; “Otherworldly. Seductive – not for the faint hearted” - The Times Production History: Summerhall Edinburgh Fringe Festival; Rockwood Music Hall NYC; Arcola Theatre Lon- don; Greenwich Theatre London; Findhorn Scotland; LinksHall Chicago; Teatr SalesjanMalta

Video: https://vimeo.com/136201176 Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.moonfool.com @M00NF00L https://www.facebook.com/moon.fool Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 18 19 Photo: anna.laclaque anna.laclaque (Braunschweig, Germany) the opera singer, pianist, performance artist and painter anna.laclaque works in her performances with live electronics to alienate and multiplicate her voice and, with the help of video projections, generates multimedia-based room installations. her artworks have the goal to initiate cross-border artistic experiments and to define new and unanticipated expression forms.

With a particular affinity to contemporary music the opera singeranna.laclaque alias Annette Stricker performed in multiple leading opera houses, world premieres (Sciarino Macbeth, Mitterer Massacre) and international festivals (Paris, New York, Bregenz). She was influenced by intensive collaborations with the stage directors Achim Freyer, Trisha Brown, and Reinhild Hoffmann, with the music directors Sivain Cambreling, Kasushi Ono, Beat Furrer, and Peter Rundel, as well as by projects with the Ensemble Modern and Klangforum Wien. Since 2013 she is member of the Trio Konkret-zu-Abstrakt concentrated on live-electro-acoustic music. In the context of her more recent development into experimental performance arts she works together with the photographer and live-electronics musician Michel Lavignon and received an award by the Braunschweigische Stiftung for the project “aria direction z” in 2015.

Disciplines: Voice, Video, Live-Electronics, Painting, Installation, Theatre strata

Strata is a long-duration performance extending over 6 hours. Starting from a white canvas, anna. laclaque moves and sings in front of the canvas. This session is recorded and then projected onto the canvas. anna.laclaque starts a new session which interferes with the previous session. She actively interacts with the anna.laclaques from the previous sessions, physically as well as acoustically. In many cycles a complex set of layers of various figures emerges and evokes the association of a painting. Induced by the shifted perspective in each session, the figures on the merged painting-analogue get arranged in the third dimension and induce a depth in the picture. The overlay of the different figures generates abstract forms arranged in a limited space similar to a theater stage. This is mirrored by live-electronic music performed by Michel Lavignon taking up anna.laclaques voice and multiplying it to a chorus of abstract and rhythmic sounds. The spectator observes and hears an interplay between random transient contacts and isolation of individuals, the tension between both being the central topic of anna.laclaques art work.

Production History: 2017 Konsumverein Braunschweig

Video: https://vimeo.com/laclaque

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.laclaque.org

https://www.facebook.com/laclaque.performance/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 20 21 Photo: David Wong Anne-Flore de Rochambeau (Montreal, Canada)

Exploring the social nature of the individual, Anne-Flore de Rochambeau’s compositions reflect unconscious mechanisms that characterize our interactions. Investing space with a refined aesthetic, she uses an organic and intuitive language to engage a sensory relationship with the audience.

Following her academic training in Paris, New York and Montreal (UQAM, BA dance 2012), Anne- Flore de Rochambeau is developing her practice as a performer and choreographer since 2013. In 2017, she finishes a triptych inspired by the fluid dynamics theory which the different parts have been present in Montreal, Toronto and France.

In the meantime, she has co-created Alt-shift with the choreographer Liliane Moussa. This collective aims to develop in situ and immersive choreographic projects, including ENTRELACS which has been successfully touring in Montreal, France and British Columbia.

The choreographer is now developing LORE, a participative work with seven dancers questioning the encounter with the audience and our relationship with the body and FADEOUT, a solo questioning our relationship to our transformative and adaptable body through time.

Disciplines: Dance, Performance, Lighting

Fadeout

The human body is an intricate and autoregulated engine designed to adapt and transform as we age. Fadeout reveals a study of this perpetually transforming machine. The choreography questions the body’s capacity to self-regulate upon the appearance of anomalies that entail an excessive degeneration or proliferation of certain cells, to the point autodestruction.

The proposed piece invites the viewer into a desert-like ambiance where a creature extricates itself from the void in order to feel alive. In search of an inexhaustible fertile land, a race driven by survival towards time and flesh emerges at the risk of losing oneself in the excess of our thirst and desires. “Anne Flore de Rochambeau’s solo stands out. Entering the media, a tube of neon divides the scene at eye level of the dancer, letting us perceive a body without a head, without a face. Arachnid fingers and hands crisscross the space under the brightness of the fluorescent light. [...] A slow and very fine game of unveiling-concealment on a concrete music strangely combining a rural and mechanical atmosphere, like a locomotive with muffledimpacts.The sound design whose movements follow body’s musicality brings textures to the solo that slides in between fluidity and weightlessness. The whole proposal is very coherent, revealing a refined composition, allowing us to affirm that Anne-Flore de Rochambeau is a young choreographer to follow. “ Mélanie Carpentier – LeDevoir – 14 septembre 2017

Production History: dance : made in Canada / fait au Canada (Toronto Aug. 2017), Quartiers Danses Festival (Montreal, Sept. 2017)

Video: https://vimeo.com/anneflore/fadeout Contact: [email protected] Website: https://annefloredanse.com/

@annefloredanse https://www.facebook.com/annefloredanse Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 22 23 Photo: Studio FILMLOVE Arturas Bumšteinas (Vilnius, Lithuania)

Arturas Bumšteinas (b.1982, Vilnius) is composer / sound artist working in the fields of performative sound art, radio, installations, experimental acoustic and electronic music (also under his Refusenik moniker). He is founding member of various ensembles and groups; since the year 2000 he has collaborated with many international artists, his exhibitions and interdisciplinary projects were presented in dozens of events around Europe; festivals where his music and art projects were presented include The Holland Festival, Sensoralia / Romaeuropa, Angelica, Vilnius Jazz, Kody, Skanumezs, Cut & Splice, etc. His music is published by labels such as Bolt, Cronica, Unsounds, Con-v, Sangoplasmo and others. In the year 2013 he was awarded “Palma Ars Acustica” prize for radiophonic arts. Bumšteinas is an artist-in-residence at DAAD Berliner Kunstlerprogramm in year 2017.

Operomanija is a Lithuania-based production house, creating and developing experimental new music theatre through diverse artistic collaborations. Since 2008 it has produced over 40 contemporary op- eras and various multidisciplinary art projects, including world-famous opera for 10 singing cashiers, supermarket sounds and piano “Have a Good Day!” (2013), audio-play “Audiokaukas” (2014–2015), spatial opera in the dark “Confessions” (2015), Baroque theatre noise machine performance “Bad Weather” (2016–2017), etc. Organization runs Contemporary opera festival NOA (New Opera Ac- tion) – one of the leading international new music theatre events in the Baltic region.

Disciplines: Theatre, Performance, Sound Art, Music, Multidisciplinary Art, Cross Genre Baroque theatre noise machine performance “Bad Weather”

“Bad Weather” is a performative sound-art event focusing on Baroque theatre noise machines. The machines are presented in an expanded electro-acoustic setting employing the means of the theatrical presentation. Together with a theatre carpenter, Bumšteinas has re-created a set of wind, rain, sea and thunder imitation devices, identical to the ones that have been used several hundred years ago throughout the European theatres.

In “Bad Weather” the ensemble is using a set of meteorological maps as scores for playing the noise machines and also engaging in stage activities that refer to themes such as Intonarumori of pre-mod- ernist era, forecasting weather of the so-called Little Ice Age, creating artificial tornadoes of sound and gusts of various dry grain, translating different atmospheric processes into the domain of live sound. Conceptual artist Ivan Cheng is invited to write and deliver a special performative libretto for “Bad Weather”.

In Baroque opera noise-machines were only a small part of the bigger theatrical mechanism of illusion, while in “Bad Weather” the whole conceptual climate is created by the same machines which now take the central stage. And what about the singing voice…? The aria is floating around in a de-centralized acousmatic space, looking for the body to pin to.

Bumšteinas started exploring theatre noise machines in 2012 when he was commissioned to create a work for Deutschland Radio Kultur. His radiophonic composition “Epiloghi. Six Ways of Saying Zangtumbtumb” was then awarded with “Palma Ars Acustica” prize as a best radio-art creation.

Production History: Cricoteka, the Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.operomanija.lt

https://www.facebook.com/operomanija Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 24 25 Photo: © MEYER ORIGINALS Aurora Fradella (Prague, Rep. Ceca)

Aurora Fradella: dancer and choreographer (born in Italy, 1992).

Aurora Fradella was educated in dance art by completing a number of educational courses and schol- arship programs at prestigious European universities and professional dance companies, including Teatro Massimo Academy, Balletto di Toscana and Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company. She also gained the experiences during regular workshops and summer internships, eg. at the London Contem- porary Dance School, the English National Ballet, Vertigo Dance Company and by the collaboration with teachers and choreographers such as Stéphane Fléchet, Danielle Ohn, Rina Shenfeld, Dorry Aben, Yaniv Abraham, Carolyn Carlson, Lorand Zachar, Aurelie Cayla and others.

Aurora started performing in her 16 years in the Junior Company Teatro Massimo Youth Dancers and later in the Balletto di Toscana and Zappalà Dance Company IT.

Since 2014 he has started a freelance choreographer: 2016 - “Duplex” chor. by Aurora Fradella and Debora Regoli (awarned as Young Choreographers Best Duo at “SoloDuo” Barnes Crossing Festival, Koln, Germany). 2016 - “Innocence” chor. by Aurora Fradella - Palermo Festival. 2015 - “Un Momentum” chor. by Aurora Fradella, Orian Breul, Lucrezia Simoni - Kibbutz contemporary Dance Company show case at Zichri Theatre, Gaaton,Israel. 2014 - “Due:2” - seed solo, MoDem AD, Compagnia Zappalà Danza - chor. Aurora Fradella She became the regular member (soloist) of Prague Chamber Ballet in July 2016.

Disciplines: Dance, Contemporary, Choreography, Theater DUPLEX

Try my choreography completely free from schemas and present it to public and juries from different countries: Prize: Tanzfestival SoloDuo NRW + friends 2016 - Koln Germany DUPLEX : WINNER Best Duo Nachwuchs: Dancers and choreographer: Aurora Fradella & Debora Regoli:

Prize motivation: A heavy breathing gives life to two strange creatures: Aurora Fradella and Debora Regoli, show ‘man as a rational animal’ in a strong female duet. They are developing a movement style that plays with the contrast between softness and wildness.

Production History: Koln (Germany) Internationales Tanzfestival SoloDuo; Rome: Teatro dell’Orologio Body Perform; Amsterdam: Café Belcampo

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9mlPODf75I

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://prazskykomornibalet.cz/en/

https://www.facebook.com/Stupor-Mundi-Contemporary-Performance-327256157738721/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 26 27 Photo: Luana Siqueira Bak Artes Performativas / Bak Performing Arts (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

The artist is a man inserted in his time, speaks of his time and is a thinker of his time. Currently in the performing arts, the scene is hybrid and the artist is free, the acting space is reinvented as a possibility of dialogue with the audience, causing each person to construct the spectacle in an intimate and subjective way. The viewer and the artist must ask themselves what is the border of their interest and if there is a border between entertainment and art. What is the space of art? Why is art necessary in the daily life of each person? An aesthetic act is a political act.

Disciplines: Contemporary Theater, Dance, Sound Art, Lighting And Installation Art, Performance

Alice - Underground Lives My Buried Mind (Deflowering the Lewis Carroll’s Script)

Inspired by the works Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass, and in the stories of Lewis Carroll and his curious relationship with the title character, we’ve developed a free show where themes such as fear, childhood and violence form the axis for the composition of the performance.

ALICE presents a fragmented dramaturgy where images, sounds and movement are created through the character’s mind.

Production History: Debut at Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2017 (Scotland)

Contact: [email protected]

Website: https://bakperformingarts.com/

@bakartsperform https://www.facebook.com/bakperformingarts Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 28 29 Photo: Hans Holtan Bandelion / Dandelion Dancetheater (Oakland, USA)

Bandelion is Eric Kupers’ core ensemble within Dandelion Dancetheater (since 2006.) Bandelion collaborates on original dance/theater/music/ceremony/activism. We are inspired by Physically Integrated Dance, in which people with and without disabilities figure out how to move together, create together, and set up accessible structures for performance. We each come with unique skills and unique difficulties, and we communicate rigorously so that we can effectively train, support each other, and create art we’re all invested in. We need regular rehearsal in order to be honest, awake, constantly growing, and fully real—so we rehearse all year long, whether or not we’re preparing for a particular project.

We are committed to creating work that is inclusive of people with and without disabilities and of all sizes, shapes, ethnicities, cultures, ages, genders, sexual orientations, art forms and identities. We want the unexpected. We want to connect. We want to grow with the communities we touch. We are a found family. We are committed to pushing and being pushed by each other, past familiar edges.

We are Bruce Bierman, Chris Gallegos, Dawn Holtan, Corissa Johnson, Nils Jorgensen, Eric Kupers, Amy Marie, Keith Penney, Frances Sedayao, Deborah Trudell and an extended network of close collaborators. To expand our reach and our training in celebrating diversity, we regularly intersect with Eric’s other ensemble, the Cal State East Bay Inclusive Interdisciplinary Ensemble. We hope to cross artistic paths with you in the studio, onstage, and/or somewhere surprising.

Disciplines: Dance, Theater, Music, Inclusion, Ceremony, Activism

Stories of Our People

“There are many stories of our people. Sometimes we are called the Man-Woman People, and sometimes we are called the Not Man-Not Woman People. Because of our connection to the air, we are sometimes called the People with Wings, or the Fairy People. And because of our connection to the Earth, we are called the Fruit People, and the Faggot People, which means the Bundle of Sticks Tied Together People. Sometimes we are called the Like-That People, the Happy People or the Strange People. Some have called us the Creative People, the Misfit People, or the Wild People. Because we travel beyond the known lands, without maps, we are sometimes called the Alone People, or the Outsider People. But of all the names we have called ourselves and been called, my favorite is the Walks Between People.” This text by Queer Elder Andrew Ramer begins Bandelion’s Stories of Our People. Through radically intimate dance, music, and storytelling we tell stories of our experiences being outsiders, misfits, loners, and artists. Performed in dance studios, living rooms, small theaters and/ or in groves of trees, the work unfolds like a night around the campfire. We celebrate our connections across all manner of differences. We enter our personal and collective underworlds. We emerge with new insight. Stories of Our People harnesses Bandelion’s decades of training in dance, music, theater, and diverse spiritual practices to invite audiences to come close, breathe together and travel side-by- side down unexpected paths.

Production History: Red Poppy Art House, San Francisco; Flight Deck, Oakland; ODC Dance Commons, San Francisco; Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, Berkeley;

Video: https://youtu.be/2fJWeQw_fsY Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.dandeliondancetheater.org/bandelion

https://www.facebook.com/dandeliondancetheater Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 30 31 Photo: Bas de Brouwer Benjamin Kahn & Cherish Menzo (Belgium, Belgium)

Sorry, But I Feel Slightly Disidentified ... is an intense 45-minute dance performance inspired by and for the artist Cherish Menzo.

This show offers a stroboscopic series of different physical and performative possibilities of being.

By overused and repeated body materials (gleaned on the internet, painting, sculptures, media, and other sources) the choreography deliberately explores stereotypes of gender, exoticism, erotism and mainstream... representations. Recognized by a wide audience, these fragments invite the spectator to revisit commonly accepted or polemical narrations.

In this process, the protagonist is slowly becoming a multiplied potentiality passing from one cultural reference to another.

The capacity of the performer to embody in such a short period of time so many figures creates a short-circuit in our cognitive and inconsequent patterns of filters and classifications.

In his work Benjamin Kahn is interested in how identity is constructed and perceived in a more and more globalized and fluid world with an increased mobility and an ever-faster access to information and imagery.

Sorry, But I Feel Slightly Disidentified ... is a dance performance that problematizes the process of cultural appropriation, a process that is as much about misrecognition and stereotyping as it is about the potential for recycling and rethinking encoded meaning when it comes to questions of embodied identity. It is an attempt to share a reflexion about the world we are living in and to contribute to discussions about the behavior and the impressions we adopt towards the ‘other’

Disciplines: Dance, Performance, Singing, Acting Sorry...But I Feel Slightly Disidentified

Sorry, But I Feel Slightly Disidentified ... is an intense 45-minute dance performance inspired by and for the artist Cherish Menzo.

This show offers a stroboscopic series of different physical and performative possibilities of being.

By overused and repeated body materials (gleaned on the internet, paintings, sculptures, media, and other sources) the choreography deliberately explores stereotypes of gender, exoticism, erotism and mainstream... representations. Recognized by a wide audience, these fragments invite the spectator to revisit commonly accepted or polemical narrations. In this process, the protagonist is slowly becoming a multiplied potentiality passing from one cultural reference to another.

The capacity of the performer to embody in such a short period of time so many figures creates a short-circuit in our cognitive and inconsequent patterns of filters and classifications.

In his work Benjamin Kahn is interested in how identity is constructed and perceived in a more and more globalized and fluid world with an increased mobility and an ever-faster access to information and imagery.

Sorry, But I Feel Slightly Disidentified ... is a dance performance that problematizes the process of cultural appropriation, a process that is as much about misrecognition and stereotyping as it is about the potential for recycling and rethinking encoded meaning when it comes to questions of embodied identity. It is an attempt to share a reflexion about the world we are living in and to contribute to discussions about the behavior and the impressions we adopt towards the “other”.

Production History: Frascati Theater Video: https://vimeo.com/229335142 (password: sorry) Contact: [email protected] Website: https://www.facebook.com/benjamin.kahn.54

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 32 33 Photo: Ernesto Mancebo Blackbird Dance - Oiseau Noir Danse (New York City, USA)

Melinda Caubarreaux is the artistic director and choreographer of Blackbird Dance-Oiseau Noir Danse. A graduate of the University of Louisiana-Lafayette where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance, She trained for two years at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance in NYC where she was accepted into the Independent Program as a part of her professional training.

Her original works have premiered at the DUMBO Dance Festival in Brooklyn, NY and the Ed- inburgh Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, the New Orleans Fringe Festival in New Orleans, LA, Dancemakers in Milwaukee, and the HOT! 24th Annual NYC Celebration of Queer Culture at Dixon Place in NYC. Blackbird Dance also traveled to Guatemala City, Guatemala and performed as part of the International Choreographers Showcase.

She is a member of the National Dance Educators Organization and the International Dance Council, based out of Paris, France.

BBD-OND looks to bring meaningful and relevant dance to today’s audience by way of an emotional journey of what influences us on a daily basis through a language that only a few speak, but all understand.

Melinda is interested in investigating social justice and cultural struggles via a socio-economic lens, while looking at human relationships and asking WHY?

Melinda is currently completing her MFA in Dance at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee researching African, Brazilian and Afro-Brazilian cultures, and the social and economic struggles that exist. She studied in Brazil researching the history and commercialization of the Candomblé.

Disciplines: Modern, Contemporary, African, Brazilian

The Compass

“The Compass” was created in response to dramatic life changes and how individuals respond to those changes. For this particular piece, the main relationship is between a parent and a child, and how each responds to a major life change, such as a marriage, the child going off to college, etc. How do outside influences affect the dynamic of their relationship? Does the past affect their relationship? Does -dis tance affect them? These are all thoughts and images I want the audience to contemplate. Ideally, we all want “home” to be the “Compass” that gives the stability of life at the end of the day.

Production History: Ballet Austin (Austin, TX), Jay Ryan Theatre (Brooklyn, NY), Dixon Place (NYC), The Wurst Biergarten (Lafayette, LA), Reve (Lafayette, LA)

Video: https://youtu.be/fKzZa6GOmSA

Contact: [email protected]

Website: https://www.facebook.com/BlackbirdDance/

@blackbirddncnyc https://www.facebook.com/blackbirddance Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 34 35 Photo: Jan Moravek Blavatsky Society (Prague, Czech Republic)

Blavatsky Society is an art collective that brings together international artists from varying backgrounds and experience currently based in the Czech Republic. They incorporate belief systems and pseudosciences into their performances thus refreshing a healthy distrust in rational knowledge. Their artistic approach combines performance, video, sound, and light with archival material. The Blavatsky Society core members are Šárka Zahálková, Cristina Maldonado & Jennifer Helia DeFelice. Each performance is conceived as an open platform and a forum for the cooperation with other artists and performers.

Disciplines: Intuition, Improvisation, Intermedia, Seance, Channeling, Psychomagic

In the House of ______The ‘In the House of ______’ séance addresses issues such as knowledge vs. belief, time and dis- tance, and spiritualism. It revives the phenomenon of connecting with the spirits of those who have passed with living beings. This performance, created within the framework of an international conference on sound and improvisation, included a sound transmission which was broadcast to audience members via an earpiece. Cooperation on sound, lighting and video & photo material: Sara Pinheiro, Jirka Jiráček, Jan Morávek and Vladimír Burian.

Production History: Alfred ve Dvore Theater (Prague), Ausland (Berlin)

Video: bit.ly/cristina_maldonado

Contact: [email protected]

Website: bit.ly/blavatskysociety

https://www.facebook.com/blavatskysociety/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 36 37 Photo: Jamie Gannon Carron Little (Chicago, USA)

As an artist and cultural producer, I place myself in communities whose residents feel distant or alienated from cultural institutions such as art museums and collaborate with the community to create experiences of culture making. I build participation over time through extensive research with community groups and neighborhood residents that results in the creation of interactive public performance. The majority of my practice has been created in my home city of Chicago, however, over the last two years I have had invitations to work in Lucerne, Switzerland, Liverpool, U.K. and Edinburgh, Scotland.

As a cultural producer, I have produced Out of Site Chicago since 2011 supporting and funding over eighty public performances in Chicago by local and international artists. In my own work I create solo and ensemble productions to create interactive performances. I employ feminist methodologies to develop my work thinking about the local and building structures of empowerment in the making and structure of the work. I was a recipient of the Shapiro Research Fellowship from the Brenda and Shapiro Research Center at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 2016 to 2017 and am interested in public performance as a tool to facilitate critical discourse in the public realm.

Disciplines: Public, Interactive, Performance, Choral, Music, Sculpture

A Transmission from the Land of Luxuria

My practice as a performance artist has a long-standing concern for language, spoken dialect, and the structure of speech. My Scottish heritage gives me a particular fascination for how the prohibition of Gaelic in the sixteenth century shaped a contemporary spoken dialect that retains a musical resonance linked to its Gaelic roots. This exploration of spoken language encompasses not only geography and culture, but also how language is gendered.

Enlarging the social role of language and its poetic expression in performance are artistic means for fostering an inclusive peaceful society. For many years I have embedded myself in neighborhoods and cities beginning my artistic process by interviewing the public. Inspired by the interviews I have written poetry facilitating a transformation in meaning. I have observed the transformational power that these one to one experiences facilitate. By integrating the poetic speech and transforming it into lyric and choral compositions, the performances have the capacity to activate broader critical discourse. Over the last year I have been doing more solo performances that begin with a conversation about our important life moments. Drawing inspiration from these shared experiences I perform pieces from my collection of public poetry utilizing voice as a material. My role as an artist in these situations is to act as a conduit, facilitating discourse and public conversations inspired by poetic meaning and interactive performance.

Production History: Gallery A&D, (Illinois, USA) The Florence Institute (Liverpool, U.K.) Hatch Art (Detroit, USA)

Video: https://vimeo.com/157048069

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.carronlittle.com

@carronlittle

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 38 39 Photo: Setty McIntosh Charlotte Brathwaite (New York City, USA)

Stage Director Charlotte Brathwaite is known for staging classical and unconventional texts, dance, visual/performance art, multi-media, plays, site-specific and music events. Her work is seen in the Americas, Europe, the Caribbean and Asia and ranges in subject matter from the historical past to the distant future illuminating issues of race, sex, power and the complexities of the human condition. Named by Playbill as “one of the “up-and-coming women in theatre to watch”, Brathwaite continues to create her own work and has ongoing collaborations with such noted artists as Peter Sellars, Meshell Ndegeochello, Justin Hicks, Abigail DeVille, and Ayesha Jordan to name a few. Awards/citations include: Franky Award, Princess Grace Award and Julian Milton Kaufman (Yale). MFA: Yale. Assistant Professor Theater Arts Massachusetts Institute of Technology. www.charlottebrathwaite.com

Disciplines: Live Performance, Installation performance, Music, Theater, Dance, Film

SHASTA GEAUX POP

She’s back! Come celebrate the return of the icon, the unforgettable, the outrageously hilarious and completely uncensored SHASTA GEAUX POP as she brings her signature brand of basement get down party to a venue near you. Crazy, irreverent and uplifting Shasta keeps it real with her gospel of laughter, her free flowing emcee style to get the party jumping. A true show woman. A consummate innertainer, SHASTA uses satire, her contagious energy and sexy southern charms to tackle naughty topics like sex while paying sonic homage to the 80s and 90s classic era of Hip-Hop teleporting the listener to elevated highs with her refreshed, remastered and newly expanded sound. Songs like “Ex- ponential Thrust”, “Kegel to the Beat”, “Nuclear Halitosis”, “Nekkid 4U” and “Spicy Hot Chocolate” keep you laughing and grooving through this immersive underground Hip-Hop pop party. If Bubble Yum met Colt 45… when opposites collide…gritty bubbles…if saltwater taffy threw a party. If Mil- lie Jackson, Roxanne Shante, OutKast and Monty Python had a baby in the year 3030...you’d get SHASTA!

Featuring music maker Justin ‘Juse’ Hicks and DJ Avg Jo in a tasty mix of Hip-Hop, House, Dance- hall, EDM, Trap, Classics and Soul tunes. Shasta believes in savoring life’s flavoring. Let Shasta bring her cypher of laughter, love, unity, self-expression, and body sweat to you!

Production History: Under the Radar Festival (New York), Bushwick Starr, Wow Festival (San Di- ego, California), Contemporary Art Center (Cinncinati, Ohio)

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-LMHiEUFjg

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.charlottebrathwaite.com

@lacharlotte_nyc https://www.facebook.com/shasta.g.pop/about Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 40 41 Photos: Ivan P.Mathieu Company Divisar - Mehdi Duman (Geneva, Switzerland)

Mehdi Duman is a dancer and performer based in Geneva, switzerland. After studying physical theatre in Geneva, he went on to work with James Thierree on a world tour of the show raoul, from 2008 to 2013. He began to danse and work on manipulating objects and puppetry with James Thierree on the show Raoul. In 2014 he founded his danse theatre company Divisar, which comes from the Span- ish word Divisadero from a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, Arte Poetica, a word which means ‘to descry’ ‘at the sight of’ when Ulysses saw his Ithaca.

The goal of the company Divisar is to create innovative work, using multiple disciplines, dance, theatre, puppetry. All in the service of bringing to the stage, to the public a maximum of authenticty and imagination to create pieces that question the time and world in which we live in today, and in which the future generations will inherit.

Disciplines: Dance, Theatre, Puppetry, Theatre of Objects, Acrobatics, Text

Peformance

Memory2Motion, first chapter in the Memory Trilogy by the company Divisar. Chapter 2 “Memoria” will be performed at the Theatre du Galpon in Geneva on the 10th to the 13th of May 2018. Mem- ory2Motion is a hybrid dance show that explores the link between the brain and the body through movement and dance. Focusing particularly on the impact that Alzheimer’s can have on our inner space and on everyday life. Through exploring new horizons, the theme investigates the elasticity and plasticity of the mind and the human body when in grips with memory loss and loss of self. Where the stage becomes a blank page on which dance can drive away the cobwebs of the spirit. At the beginning, a camera captures time. A photographed image multiplies and propagates in the space, like a ripple in the water. A character lives in an odyssey that leads him to a haven of memories. He tests and probes the functioning of his thought’s and his self before falling into a spiral which leads him to obscurity. Two characters follow him. His brother, a passive witness, who document’s his journey assailed by memories and absences, and a second, mysterious character who follows him as a shadow, a silhouette of his own spirit that tries to bring him back to clarity and lucidity. Memory2Motion is a show which documents a character’s decomposition, degradation and loss of the memory and self. It is a scenic journey through the body that shows the decline of a personality.

Production History: Geneva-June 2016, Athenes June 2016, Astana Kazahkstan July 2016, Berlin December 2016, Salerno 2017, Geneva May 2017, Fribourg Sep and Oct 2017

Video: https://vimeo.com/220946164 password: m2m

Contact: [email protected]

Website: https://www.divisar.ch

https://www.facebook.com/divisar.ch Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 42 43 Photo: Quentin Burley Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company (New York City, USA)

2018 marks my twentieth year as a New York company director, choreographer, and dancer. I have strived to challenge myself, the work I produce and the audiences with whom the work engages. Dance Magazine wrote, “Perhaps Gwirtzman can’t decide if he makes abstract dances or is a storyteller?” To which I have thought, why must I choose one over the other? Coming from a theatrical background I have consistently straddled the line separating abstraction from narration. This dual focus stems from my dancing body, which combines pedestrian- ism and razor-sharp virtuosity. This synthesis is long cultivated from divergent influences, chief among them folk dance. Deborah Jowitt has summarized my style, “blending casualness with precision.” Musicality, physicality, humor, charisma and accessibility are values of my work. The intersection of people is at its heart. I am interested in the tipping point when intimacy crosses into violence, peeking into the darker side of relationships. I seek to challenge risk-taking and trust. In the disturbing reality of America today, as values and progress erode, my interest is to highlight the repercussions these shifts provoke. I seek to position disruption and loss against continu- ity and connection, and explore new ways of partnering as a metaphor to the anxieties of the near and present danger. With the darkening of the political landscape, the danger of discrimination and hatred is more than close, it is upon us. I seek to explore the outrageous, highlighting the tension between one’s interior and the megaphone one projects for others.

Disciplines: Dance, Film, Theater, Installation, Durational Art, Community Programming Cycles

Cycles, one of the darkest and most celebrated dances in Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company’s repertory, is reconstructed and recontextualized for the twentieth anniversary season (2018/19). Abstract and absent an explicit story, Cycles presents narrative motifs that replay repeatedly, transforming the action into a mysterious ritual without a singular explanation. The search to know why is disrupted by the opaque, stylized gestures; the confounding humanity of the performers adds to the cycle of questioning.

”Impressive. The dancers treat one another as parts to be shuffled, snapped into place, reshuffled and eventually cast aside. Cycles slowly mutates from abstract into explicitly violent movement, catching us up in its kinetic spell without descending to melodrama.” The Village Voice

“A gripping series of abstract, four-bodied sculptures, animated by surprising jolts of energy and cunning games of weight and balance. The riveting drama lies in the work’s formal design and the dispassionate clarity with which it is performed.” Back Stage

“Cycles featured welcome compositional complexity and organic rhythm. Black costumes against squares of light projected on the back wall nicely defined a space where bodies became hyper-real, but were allowed occasional human imprecision.” Dance Magazine

“By the time the moodier, pure-dance piece Cycles began we were ready to see what makes dance beautiful.” The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Gwirtzman’s stark, arresting Cycles qualifies for the annual “Innovative Works” show more than anything in recent years.” The Charlotte Observer

Production History: Joyce SoHo, The Flea Theater, Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Princeton University, Blumen- thal Performing Arts Center (Charlotte, NC), The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts (Philadelphia)

Video: https://youtu.be/oxaMzTmeVJc Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.gwirtzmandance.org

@danielgwirtzman https://www.facebook.com/GwirtzmanDance Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 44 45 Photo: Gelareh Pour de serpa soares/sussman/white (Berlin, Germany)

Claudia de Serpa Soares was born in Lisbon. After her dance studies at the National Conservatory in Lisbon and at the Centre National de Dance Contemporaine d’Angers, she danced with Iztok Kovac in Slovenia and Paulo Ribeiro in Lisbon, among others. In 1999 she joined the dance ensemble of the Schaubühne Theatre in Berlin under the artistic direction of Sasha Waltz. In the following years and still today, she dances in many works by Sasha Waltz. As an actress, she performed in Fish Love and The 6th Continent directed by Lilo Baur. She assisted Lilo Baur and signed the choreography of Dido and Aeneas at the Opera de Dijon and Jochen Sandig in Human Requiem with the Rundfunk- chor Berlin. Claudia has been working with the Rufus Corporation in New York and choreographed several video art projects with Eve Sussman. She has created and performed Crossroads with Ronald Kukulies, Edgar with Grayson Millwood, The Circuit a solo performance and More Up a Tree with drummer Jim White and artist Eve Sussman.

Disciplines: Dance, Music, Art, Installation

More up a Tree

More Up a Tree is a performance by a drummer, a dancer and an artist that takes an instinctive approach to musical flow, free from conventional narrative and melody. Emotional reaction to music is so commonplace that it is easy to forget the phenomenon is extraordinary. It is as mysterious as gravity.

The piece takes place in a 22’ x 13’ mirrored box. The windows are made with 2-way mirrored Plexi- glas. When the show begins, the audience sees inside but the dancer and the drummer cannot see out. At times the audience sees themselves reflected and cannot see inside the box. The performers are alone, in public. Their unusual sense of privacy on stage changes their demeanor while the audience has an or- dained voyeurism, transcending the usual performer-viewer relationship.

By doing away with narrative and melody, and making a constantly “in flux” relationship to the public, attention is focused on the agency of the drumming and dancing and the audience. In More Up a Tree, we reveal the meaningful nature of movement by removing tonality and concentrating action inside a box.

Production History: Grand Theatre Luxembourg, Bam Fisher-New York, The Substation-Melbourne

Contact: [email protected]

Website: https://vimeo.com/user19486438

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 46 47 Photo: Robbie Sweeny Deborah Slater (San Francisco, USA)

An award-winning multi-media dance company, DEBORAH SLATER DANCE THEATER does visually gorgeous, acrobatic, talking dance. DSDT is dedicated to the creation of works that explore social issues using humor, original movement, text and/or music.

We structure stories, folklore, history and contemporary culture into concentric circles that have points of connection between them. How can we hold two different points of view on a subject at the same time? To what extent does the act of perceiving reflect or distort reality?

Our approach is based on the belief that art and everyday life are not separate events but that Art is the human attempt to create meaning and to introduce formal shapes and paths through the chaos of the life experience.

DSDT’s focus has been on bringing experimental art forms and educational outreach into the community since l989. The work formalizes informal gestures - It is in the physicalization of psychological states, in the deliberate time turn of a head, the repeated motion of an arm reaching out and drawing back, the clenching of the ribs, the restraint of a stylized step – depicting first one character and then the next. By acknowledging the power of ‘body language’, Slater, working as director in close collaboration with her performers, highlights and underscores dramatic themes, establishing the dream- like environment of the piece and preparing the audience for an other than traditional reality. The inter-weaving of movement and language is seamless. The specifics of each performer create a whole ensemble language.

Disciplines: Dance, Theater, Devised, Multi-Media, Visual, Music

LINE OF BEAUTY An essay from the pen of painter/satirist William Hogarth initially inspired “Line of Beauty”. ‘… S-shaped curved lines signify liveliness and activity and excite the attention of the viewer as contrasted with straight lines, parallel lines, or right-angled intersecting lines, which signify stasis, death, or inani- mate objects.’

Out of this has come two works, additionally inspired by the writing of poet Jane Hirshfield. About LINE OF BEAUTY, critic Rita Felciano wrote:

[actor] Silver adopted a cajoling, insisting voice of great urgency, talking about the everyday and above all about time passing. It would seem impossible for Greenberg and Harris to resist, but resist they did. Eyeing each other suspiciously from upstage corners, they reveal themselves as being about as different they could be. … Even as the two get closer … holding hands on the tip of their toes they circle around, observe from the sideline. … Just as you think there is a match, the duet to be explodes. Then in a lovely, very slow sequence of tightening turns, they close in towards each other. Yet there is nothing romantic about that final embrace. It felt fated, inevitable, perfect.” - Rita Felciano, DanceView Times

The second, MY LIFE WAS THE SIZE OF MY LIFE premiered at the 8x8x8 Festival and has been performed at Constants and Variables in San Francisco, at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa and is now going to be made into a film. It is a powerful solo created about coming to terms with one’s life. Production History: Fort Mason/SF International Arts Festival, Noh Theater/SF, The Uptown/Oka- land, CA, Iowa State University Theater, Studio 210/SF

Video: https://vimeo.com/dsdt Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.deborahslater.org @DSDT https://www.facebook.com/DeborahSlaterDanceTheater Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 48 49 Photo: Vladimir Chebaldin, Aleksey Viktorow Julia Rosa Peer (Innsbruck, Austria)

DIVA Arts Collective is a young, ambitious and idealistic corporation, which wants to create space for experimental art of all genres and in an international context. The Tyrolean actress Julia Rosa Stöckl and Berlin director Reinhard Göber founded DIVA, the First International Monodrama Festival of Austria back in 2010, after their collaboration at the State Theater in Innsbruck for the production of Goethe’s “Urfaust”. In our projects we work primarily with documentary material and are experiment- ing with different theatrical styles, performance art and multimedia.

Disciplines: Contemporary Performance, Post-Modern Theatre Leaving Ziller Valley

A reflection about modern - day solitude

”Julia Rosa Stöckl covered a wide range of states of mind, moods, and sounds, as she gave us a brave, honest, often ferocious account of what it’s like to live with a sense of local and national roots as they dissolve into and indeterminate corporate, global pool.” (Michael Miller, New York Arts, USA)

”Leaving Ziller Valley, performed by Julia Rosa Stöckl, revolves around the German conceptual term “Heimat” (plainly defined as the relationship one may have to a particular place) and explores its meaning through a dramatic, vibrant and energetic theatrical presentation. The performance also displays a personal quest for identity, emotional security, and a sense of belonging and purpose, away from the comfort of one’s home. It shows how relativity comes with a term or a word being understood differently across regions, and how several elements beyond physical or spacial environment constitute “home.” (IAPAR International Theater Festival, India)

Leaving Ziller Valley tells the story of the young Tyrolean manager Elizabeth. Alienated and lost from jet-setting between high-end hotels from Paris to Shangai, she decides to stay in New York. Maybe in this city full of dreamers, she can find what she is looking for: a place that she can call home and where she can ultimately find herself.

Production History: Leaving Ziller Valley has been developed over the course of several years, has been translated into 3 languages and Julia Rosa Peer is performing it at various festivals and theatres worldwide including Austria, Argentina, Armenia, Chile, Estonia, Germany, India, Israel, Russia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Uruguay and the USA.

2017 - Prize for Julia Rosa Stöckl for her “Acting Skills” Lively Faces International Theater Festival, Russia

2016 - Nomination for Reinhard Göber for “Best Director” Mar del Plata International Theater Festival, Argentina

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.juliarosa.eu/zillervalley/

@divaartscollective

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 50 51 Photo: Rory de Brouwer DLT Experience (Toronto, Canada)

DLT Experience is an award winning company presenting shows across Canada, Europe and India. Our most recent credits include the one-to-one show The Stranger, the episodic theatrical series The Invisible City and the 72 hour immersive experience That Ugly Mess.

In our shows the audience is transformed from passive observer into active agent. We strive to move forward from the general definition of immersive and site specific theatre, making the audience an integral part of the narrative they experience.

Our creations take place in multiple indoor and outdoor locations across the city, creating an open conversation with the city’s life and the participants themselves.

A sense of discovery is key to our projects. Audiences are invited to diverge from their routine, step into the unknown and explore their inner worlds. They’re invited to see what’s next door, behind a major street, or in the basement of a storefront they may pass by everyday. They uncover a city beneath the exterior first impression and come face to face with its occupants and its most unexpected sides.

We define our work as audience specific theatre: the lines between artist and audience are erased and the two become co-creators in an intimate act of creation. In audience specific theatre, the word audience is synonymous with co-author. We propose to design shows specifically created for each individual who will take part in the experience, generating an artistic exchange between participant and artist.

Disciplines: Theatre, Immersive Theatre, Live Art, Participatory, Site Specific, Audience Specific The Stranger The Stranger is an urban immersive format designed for one audience member at a time, who becomes the protagonist of a multi-sensory experience.

The project transforms the audience into actor. Lost in an urban labyrinth, the spectator explores streets, alleyways and other undisclosed locations around the city. They meet with and follow “strangers” while becoming the centre of a narrative that blurs the lines between reality and fiction.

Due to the direct interaction between actor, audience and the surrounding environment, each performance offers a completely unique experience. The familiar landscape of the city is transformed into an urban stage. The audience interacts with performers that emerge from the crowds of pedestrians and interactive installations including dance, music and painting. The project invites the audience to question their relationship with the city, themselves, and the artists they encounter.

Every edition of the format changes radically depending on the characteristics of the place where it is being presented. Each production includes a new cast, locations and scenes/interactions created originally for the city visited.

To date, various editions of the format have been presented in three different continents, receiving praise from audiences and critics alike. The Stranger received “Outstanding Production, Direction and Ensemble” from NOW Magazine Toronto Best of The Fest, 2014. In 2016, the show received a nomination for the critics award “Premio Rete Critica” from PaneAcquaCulture, for the Italian edition at the Kilowatt Festival. Production History: Luminato Festival - Toronto, Canada; SummerWorks Performance Festival - To- ronto, Canada; Kilowatt Festival - Sansepolcro, Italy; Thespo Festival - Mumbai, India; Khoj Interna- tional Artists’ Association - New Dehli, India; rEvolver Festival - Vancouver, Canada Video: https://player.vimeo.com/video/240891676 Contact: [email protected] Website: https://www.dltexperience.com/

@dltexperience https://www.facebook.com/dltinteractivetheatricalexperience/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 52 53 Photo: Elif Sezen Elif Sezen (Melbourne, Australia)

Elif Sezen is an Australian-Turkish interdisciplinary visual artist, bilingual writer and poet. She received her Doctorate in Fine Art from Monash University (2014). She lives and works in Melbourne.

Elif’s major performance titled ‘Night Watch’ was documented and became part of her solo PhD exhibition in 2013 at MADA Gallery, Monash University. Her interdisciplinary practice evolves through various media including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, print media, installation, digital media, artist’s books and poetry. Her work speculatively re-conceptualizes memory traces in emergence from familial/personal/collective trauma and loss. This explorative process leads her to rather a restor- ative and even a celebrative notion of self-construction, desire, longing and a sense of homecoming. Homecoming is an urgent factor in her work, by being both elusive and ambiguous, almost necessarily so because transcultural. It is important to stress that the explicit ‘I’ point of view plays only quietly in her art projects and poetry.

Elif has participated in various exhibitions nationally and internationally. She founds it fascinating to thread elements of visual art, performance art and poetry in her work in the context of re-conceptual- izing and poeticizing. Some of her art projects are an extension of her poems which has metaphysical and quasi-autobiographical resonances. Her collection of poems ‘Universal Mother’ was published recently by GloriaSMH Press. More details of her work on different interrelated forms and disciplines can be found on her website: www.elifsezen.com

Disciplines: painting/printmedia, artist-books, performance, digital-media, poetry, sculpture Immunosuppression

In my performance titled ‘Immunosuppression’, my models are various women (including myself) with their hands touching their faces. At some stage, this work will also be digitally manipulated where a pair of hands appears as metaphorical wings. This representation is a characteristic example of reconceptualising the main association of well-known sculptor August Rodin’s bust ‘L’adieu’. Rodin’s work refers to an allegorical representation of a woman on the threshold of a farewell, and French sculptor Camille Claudel was the model for his sculpture in 1898. I wanted to extend the meaning of this image by seeing it as a woman who is sculpting herself and declaring freedom within a culture that is pregnant to such possibility. In my work, this artistic vision evolves and unwraps the meaning of reconstructing the self to another level. This collective performance also encourages an ongoing process and dialogue of understanding women from different backgrounds in our contemporary soci- eties, with the hope of liberating them from their silently suffering image.

Production History: In various houses, streets and parks of Melbourne (Australia)

Contact: [email protected]

Website: https://www.elifsezen.com/

https://www.facebook.com/elif.sezen.12 Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 54 55 Photo: Federico Ambrosi Fabio Bonelli (Milano, Italy)

Fabio Bonelli is an italian composer, multi-instrumentalist, performer who plays guitar, clarinet, drums and several objects from everyday life.

Since 2007 he travels around the world with his creative projects searching for a join between everyday life and enchanting:

Musica da cucina, concrete ambient folk for guitar, clarinet and kitchen tools

Sit In Music, indie-pop with a human and a band of puppets

Kosmophon, a journey into the sounds of the world through old vinyls of ethnic music

Sii Bih Dii, improvisations on birdwathcers vinyls

dBEETH, a DJ set of classical music on vynil

The current projects include also expressive music workshops for kids, called MusicaBuji Laboratories, in collaboration with Francesca Giomo.

Fabio Bonelli composed soundtracks for documentary (INSOLITO CINEMA, DON’T MOVIE), theatre (Gruppo Teatro campestre) and created sound design installations for exhibitions collaborating with visual artists (Audiovisual, Container Art, Tamara Ferioli, Dome Bulfaro).

In his tour he opened for for Amiina, Fink, Blonde redhead, Enzo Pietropaoli, Jackie’o’Motherfucker, AboveTheTree, Bob Corn, Comaneci.

Disciplines: Music, Rhythmic Drawing, Video MATITA

Matita is an ensemble of electric piano and four rhythmic designers. The drawing is made on a microfoned table, which amplifies the sound of pencils, pens and markers.

At the same time the act of drawing turns into a rhythmic, visual and sound gesture. It accompanies and gives shape and structure to the music, creating a product whose sound suggestions can be linked to a certain minimal electronic.

The rhythmic design is an instinctive gesture, free from traditional beauty canons, but at the same time not casual and even coinciding with the energy released in the flow of musical timing, which remains on paper as a posterior musical score, as an atemporal trace.

Entirely live performance gives life to an organic electronic, played between electronic piano, pencils and markers.

The audience can experience the concert directly by sitting at the table and drawing/playing music with the ensemble. The maximum number of people joining the table for every concert

At the end of each performance there are hundreds of ‘wild’ drawings produced by MATITA and the audience. Production History: Fabio Bonelli played and performed at Triennale (Milan, Italy), Museum of Science and Technology (Milan, Italy), MITO Fringe (Milan, Italy), Frison (Freiburg, Switzerland), MONA FOMA 2011 (Hobart, Tasmania), 09 Linz (Linz, Austria), Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto (Biella, Italy), Teatro Eliseo (Rome, Italy), Silencio (Paris, France), MAXXI (Rome, Italy), RomaEuropa (Rome, Italy)..

Video: https://vimeo.com/165400369 Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.fabiobonelli.com

https://www.facebook.com/matitamatite Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 56 57 Photo: Elaiza Irizarry Fernando Calzadilla (Miami, USA)

Ever since Aristotle’s Categories, Western thought has been obsessed with categorization, the process by which people, events, ideas, objects are recognized and differentiated from one another. It implies they are grouped into categories or classes for a specific reason.

A category or classification rules the relationship between subjects and objects of knowledge. Once we establish an answer to the question What is it? then an essentialist is of being is also established. This essentialist is carries with it hierarchies that are culturally and historically conditioned.

Instead of essentialist orders of classification, I rather use statements of relationship. Calzadilla as Painting establishes a temporal relationship that is not essential to Calzadilla’s being nor does it ex- clude other relationships happening in unison, for example, Calzadilla as Art Installation, or Calzadilla as Performance.

I am more interested in process than in product.

Processes are fluid, always changing, like statements of relationship. I try to live an aesthetically conditioned process that is always reassessing its own path. This practice leaves marks, the traces of my process. I consider those traces not as representations but as once-againness, always in relation to the previous yet never identical.

Fernando Calzadilla

Disciplines: Performance, Painting, Photography Duologue With A Painting

In Duologue with a Painting artist Fernando Calzadilla performs as a painting that sustains a duologue (dialogue between two people) with whomever wishes to sit and talk. There is no script and the conversation is open to whatever the sitter wants to ask the painting but mostly about aesthetics, philosophy, dreams, genre, and gender. There is a chair about ten feet (3 meters) from the painting where participants sit to duologue with the painting. Both painting and participant’s voice are amplified through microphones and loudspeakers. Lighting is focused on the painting and the sitter. The rest of the space is lit by bounced light from the painting. The painting consists of a backdrop hung from the ceiling down to the floor over a 30-inch high platform and extended to the sitter’s chair. The sitter is at the edge of the painting. The painting is a reclining nude.

The performance usually runs for 90 minutes with participants taking turns to sit and talk.

Production History: Performed in April 28 and 29, 2017, as part of Inside the Box Series at Miami Theater Center.

Video: https://vimeo.com/fernandocalzadilla

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.fernandocalzadilla.com

https://www.facebook.com/fernando.calzadilla Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 58 59 Photo: Karel Moonen Flam Chen (Tucson, USA)

Flam Chen creates dazzling public spectacle, merging daredevil acrobatics, pyrotechnics and a mastery of light, air and fire. Our themes explore narratives that roam from the fantastic to the satirical with elaborate costuming; tightly woven choreography and skills finely honed over 20 years of innovation in the performing arts.

As a working ensemble, we are deeply committed to community interaction, educational outreach, artistic collaboration and public ceremony. We produce bespoke, large-scale works including the All Souls Procession held annually in Tucson, drawing over 150,000 participants from all over the world to honor their Ancestors.

From intimate private events, to large scale public festivals, Flam Chen creates spectacle for the New Century.

We invite you in to explore our world!

Disciplines: Fire, Aerial, Circus, Dance, Spectacle, BigArt

The Fishers Wish

FLAM CHEN presents the retelling of an ancient allegory in their new circus spectacle “ FISHERS WISH”. The Fisher’s Wish is a Pyrotechnic Fantastical Fish Tale, Replete with cinematic visuals, hypnotic Drum n Bass and new circus physicality-

A cross cultural story of ambition, the true meaning of personal power and the dynamism of human will.

SYNOPSIS

A fisherman and his wife eke out a meager existence in a ramshackle little hut by the sea. Until one fateful day, when the fisherman catches a terrible and awesome magical fish, who will grant him any wish.

This 60 minute outdoor experience with a cast and crew of 20 is a sight to behold.

Staged around an innovative, aerial, counterweight armature, riveting digital artscapes, novel, sculptural puppetry and a live narrated sound design-The Fishers Wish is a Fish Tale for all audiences to believe!

Production History: Leal Senado Square Macau, China*Bonnaroo, Manchester Tn*Electric Forest, Michigan*Nocturnal Wonderland-Electric Daisy Carnival*Hornings Hideout*Mesa Arts Center* and many many more!

Video: https://vimeo.com/flamchen

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://flamchen.com

@flamchen33 https://www.facebook.com/flamchen Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 60 61 Photo: Timothy Black Gabrielle Civil (Columbus, OH, USA)

Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, originally from Detroit, MI, USA. She has premiered almost fifty original solo and collaborative performance art works around the world, including a year-long investigation of practice as a Fulbright Fellow in Mexico and a trilogy of diaspora grief works after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Her work arrives at the intersection of poetry, installation and conceptual art and aspires to be visionary and site-responsive. She has performed in galleries, theaters, classrooms, and the streets. Ritual is central to her process and practice. Key topics include diaspora grief, race madness, sexuality, and love.

Since May 2014, she has been performing “Say My Name (an action for 270 abducted Nigerian girls)” around the world. Other recent works include “Q&A”; “a ritual of nest and flight”; and “… hewn and forged….” in the Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival. Her writing has appeared in Small Axe, Something on Paper, Aster(ix), Obsidian and more. She is also the author of Swallow the Fish, a memoir in performance art (CCM Press, 2017).

The aim of her work is to open up space.

Disciplines: Performance, Installation, Improvisation, Poetic, Ritual

Q & A

What do we ask of art? of the black feminist performance artist? How do we question and answer each other? Often after performing, I would wait with heart racing to hear questions from the audience. Brief afterwords would morph into another kind of performance--pointed, earnest, digressive, fascinating, political and strange--enacted for me and other audiences. With this inspiration, I created “Q & A” as an interrogatory playground. Turning the usual post-performance question and answer session on its head, this two- to four-hour durational work transforms talkback into live art action. People can arrive when they want, leave when they want, or stay for as long as they want. Audience members are invited to speak, stand, breathe, whisper, move, dance, talk to themselves and each other while conventional Q&A trappings return in a loop. (At the microphone: “Any questions? Does the audience have any questions?”) My own self-questioning in word and flesh informs the ritual flow. Body / politics come into play. Objects come alive. Intimacy and community collide. Why are we here? What can we do? How can we answer for what is going on? What do we have to say?

Production History: The Roost, Granville Ohio, USA; Eclipsing Festival, Chicago, IL, USA

Contact: [email protected]

Website: https://www.gabriellecivilartist.com

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 62 63 Photo: Denis Laner Hannes Egger (Bolzano, Italy)

The artistic practice of Hannes Egger is linked to an essentially conceptual approach aimed at engaging and interacting with the public. His performances, installations and participatory projects invite people to adopt an unusual attitude or viewpoint, in order to reflect on our surrounding reality and the way we share the spaces we inhabit. His concept of art does not refer to an opus in the most traditional sense, but consists of creating situations of an open and in-progress platform, to see how these situations (after having been meticulously planned by the artist) will develop once the audience participates. Hannes Egger often provides some coordinates or instructions to follow, and thus turns the action of the participant into the art work itself.

Disciplines: Performance Art, Installation, Participatory Art, Concept Art, Theory

Visitor Center

The installation Visitor Centre features an audio installation in which the artist prompts the visitor to follow his instructions to act around a black seating platform. The outcome is an in-depth reflection on the role of the audience: It intertwines typical attitudes adopted in exhibitions with the history of performance art, the technology of audio guides, the philosophy of Boris Groy and the début of Offending the Audience, the play by Peter Handke which premi√®red in Frankfurt in 1966, to form a whole new pattern of information and personal experiences.

Production History: Galerie M, Berlin (D)

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.hannesegger.com

https://www.facebook.com/hannes.egger.167 Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 64 65 Photo: Dennis Yenmez HARTMANNMUELLER (Düsseldorf, Germany)

HARTMANNMUELLER was founded in 2011 by Simon Hartmann and Daniel Ernesto Mueller. They met during their studies in contemporary dance at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Es- sen. In 2015 they were awarded by the city of Düsseldorf for their last achievments in the field of the performing arts.

HARTMANNMUELLER believe in the body as the ideal means of expression, since it can be used in its entirety, almost limitless in the sense of stage performance. Movement, voice, and intellectual association with a concept - all facets of the body are considered by both as a complex entity and are always exhausted to the extreme. Starting from a stage design or a special material, they elaborate the facets of the clichés and archetypes that are relevant for a particular piece, in order to distort them to the extreme or to remove them from their context. Their scenes are characterized by a tension between emotional content and ambiguously interpretable actions. The resulting irony is a very basic element of their work, in which seriousness is always doubted.

In recent years HARTMANNMUELLER have been working on a physicality and a stage presence, which is not primarily concerned with contemporary movements. The duo relies on stylistic means of film and pop culture. Interaction with the audience is a key element of their performances. The structure and execution of their actions is usually rather ambiguous which makes whatever happens on stage less obvious. The work of HARTMANNMUELLER is not pointed at any particular target audience. They are rather working on a universal stage lang

Disciplines: Performance, Visualisation, Live Art, Black Box

Du bist nicht allein

In “Du bist nicht allein” HARTMANNMUELLER strip the here and now and escort the audience with repetitions and variations to astonishing dimensions of imagination. Somewhere between dream and reality lies this expedition, exposing a new reality with colors, light and shadows and music. Each new discovery reveals illuminating insights which the both of them traverse like restlessly driven men. With the increase of physicality to the extreme the imagined is directly inscribed in the body and their experience. HARTMANNNUELLER make it their task to seduce the audience with a look at an unknown world and an irritating state of emotions.

Production History: tanzhaus nrw Düsseldorf, PACT Zollverein Essen, Fabrik Heider Krefeld

Video: https://vimeo.com/199713672

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.hartmannmueller.de

Hector Canonge is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, cultural entrepreneur, and educator based in New York City. His work incorporates the use of new media technologies, cinematic narratives, performance, and socially engaged art to explore and treat issues related to constructions of identity, gender roles, and the politics of migration. Challenging the white box settings of a gallery or a museum, or intervening directly in public spaces, his performances mediate movement, endurance, and ritualistic processes. Some of his actions and carefully choreographed performances involve collaborating with other artists and interacting with audiences. His installations, interactive platforms, and performance art work have been exhibited and presented in the United States, Latin America, Europe and Asia. As cultural entrepreneur, Canonge created and organizes the annual Performance Art Festival of NYC, ITINERANT, and the monthly initiatives TALKaCTIVE and LiVEART.US hosted at public institutions in NYC. He is responsible for projects such as ARTerial PERFORMANCE LAB (APLAB), a transcontinental initiative to foster collaboration among performance artists from the Americas, PERFORMEANDO, a program that focuses on featuring Hispanic performance artists living in the USA and Europe, and PERFORMAXIS, an international residency program in collaboration with art spaces in South America. He conducts the art residency CONVIVIR from MODULO 715, his studio in Queens. Canonge is at work in Performance Art Research Center, PARC, a platform to further the development of Performance Art.

Disciplines: PerformanceArt, ConceptualArt, InterdisciplinaryArt, SocialPractice, NewMediaArts, Perfor- manceDanceTheater

DRAUMAZ

DRAUMAZ (from the proto-germanic word for dream) constitutes Canonge’s exploration of the various levels of “Being and Awareness.” The project deals with notions of presence, absence and the territory in between. Through a series of minimal actions, at times combined with explosive-energetic movements, Canonge deals and dwells in the territory of consciousness, subconsciousness, and uncon- sciousness. In this durational, site-specific performance, Canonge transforms the physical space using elements and materials brought from other regions in the Americas.

“Ironically enough, I ended the performance with the word HOPE written with corn husk that I had brought to Berlin from Bolivia via NYC. I needed much hope after the violent robbery I had been subjected to right after delivering my performance at OKK. In the blink of an eye, I was left with nothing, but the memories of what I had brought with me to Berlin. For many hours, I was hopeless as I faced the fact that documentation of my work, my equipment, documents, and personal belongings were gone. As I waited for days hoping that the thieves would have a change of heart, or that the Polizei would have some leads, DRAUMAZ, the dream (Traum), turned into Traum(a), the nightmare of professional loss and personal angst. Through this work, I learned valuable lessons, and have come to terms with the true nature of ephemeral experiences that we create with Performance Art. To be able to talk about my loss as I include it in this year’s calendar, is a sign of hope in itself as I’m able to come to terms with my own DRAUMAZ.”

Production History: Organ kritischer Kunst, OKK, Berlin, Germany. Video: http://www.vimeo.com/hectorcanonge OR http://www.youtube.com/hectorcanonge Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.hectorcanonge.net

@hectorcanonge https://www.facebook.com/hectorcanonge Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 68 69 Photo: Lee, Xiao-Xiong Hung Dance (Kaohsiung, Taiwan)

Hung-Chung Lai received Bachelor of Fine Arts and graduated from Taipei National University of Arts in 2012. He as an artistic director in Hung Dance basically in Taiwan since 2017.

In July to Oct 2017, His work “Birdy” won 1st prize in “Burgos International Choreography Com- petition” and won Audience Award Best Choreography in “Masdanza International Dance Festival”. In June “Watcher” won 3rd prize and Critics Award in “31th International Competition for Cho- reographers Hannover” and “Watcher” was invited to M1 Contact Dance Festival by T.H.E Dance Company.

Hung is in charge of the co-ordination and planning of the Company’s various performances. The works of the company mainly display the characteristics of Taiwanese performing arts tradition, In- clude Chinese dance, contemporary or inspired by Taiwanese culture.

Disciplines: Emotional, Contemporary, Exquisite, Chinese Dance, Momentary, Life

Birdy

For the dream

In this duet, the female dancer dreams of a life of a bird and the male dancer symbolizes a supporter, a cage, a heart of mirror and a dream. She is willing to sacrifice everything and to do whatever it takes in order to achieve this dream. However, in reality, people often feel trapped in their own little bubbles because of different morality, different belief, different ideal, and different responsibility. We are tamed. We are trapped in the cage we build for ourselves.

In this work, the female dancer wears a special head piece called “Ling Zi”. Its long pheasant tail feathers often worn on warriors’ helmets in traditional Chinese opera in order to present the warriors’ power and skill. In this duet, “Ling Zi” presents an image of a bird, an extension of inner emotions, a desire to escape from reality, as well as the passion to chase the dream.

In real life, if we never take actions to achieve our dream, then dream will always be just a dream, like that weightless “Ling Zi”. If the dream is something worth fighting for, then we must go after the dream, take action, and do whatever it takes to make the dream come true. Like an old Chinese prov- erb, “Though death befalls all men alike. It may be heavier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather. People live and people die, but the spirit they left forever shine.”

Production History: Teatro Principal

Video: https://vimeo.com/236243651/5993966c25

Contact: [email protected]

Website: https://www.facebook.com/HungDanceTaiwan/

https://www.facebook.com/HungDanceTaiwan/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 70 71 Photo: Kai Bienert Jadi Carboni and Burkhard Beins (Berlin, Germany)

Jadi Carboni is a Berlin-based dancer and choreographer. She studied at the National Dance Academy in Rome, at the SNDO in Amsterdam, and at the Venice Biennale under Carolyn Carson. Jadi has worked throughout Europe, South America, and the USA with artists such as Kirstie Simson, Kath- leen Hermersdorf, Stephanie Maher, Katie Duck, Julyen Hamilton, Barbara Wachendorf, Scottish National Theatre, and Sasha Waltz.

As a choreographer her credits include an EU-funded science-art research project, “On the Way to Im- mortality”, the collaboration with the Ruhrfestspiele for the dance theater production “Areja”, the duet “Kreislauf”, and two solos (Behind the veil and Secret Ritual), which have been presented in several festivals in Berlin, Athens, Rome, and Venice. In addition to her work in dance, Jadi is a poi spinner with London-based Feeding the Fish, a certified yoga teacher, and a prize-winning actress (“El Ray”, Barcelona Film Festival).

“My somatic approach to sound and movement helps me to integrate different disciplines into my work, through improvisation practice. I am inspired by the multiplicity of life, which is for me a fundamental tool for development and discovery. I organise my studies in a research project, called Complementary Device, a container for a series of performances and texts, inspired by the duality and the synergetic potential of the encounter of two elements.I am committed to integrate social-political issues, therapeutic and performing art practices into my work, creating resources for development, consciousness, and growth.”

Disciplines: Dance, Music, Performing Arts, Improvisation, Notation, Light Design ADAPT/OPPOSE -- VERSION FOR THREE DANCERS AND THREE MUSICIAN

Adapt/Oppose is a graphic notation for structured improvisation by the musician-composer Burkhard Beins. It is based on a handful of basic signs – circles, horizontal lines and dashed diagonal lines, which indicate the cueing performers, and determine the function of the chosen material – by either adapting or opposing a given situation. Jadi Carboni, inspired by the physicality of this symbols, propose Beins to try out the system with some dancers. In 2016 they bring together a group of three dancers and three musicians and decide to develop a dramaturgy using four pages of the notation, alternated with electronic interludes composed by Beins, who would be also designing the light, during the performance. The notation provides a modality to link different time-based art forms structurally, allowing the performer to focus more on the quality of the material and on the relations/intervals produced. Within the structure, the players have to make choices about the duration, the tempo, the space and type of their material. The essential point of Jadi inspiration is the possibility to use the simplicity, the rigour, and the complexity of a structure like A/D, to create the space where to listen and articulate movement as if it would be sound, and to feel and visualize sound as if would be movement. This process amplifies the awareness on the body, improves the listening abilities of the performers, creating more interesting, authentic ways to initiate/respond, and allows the audience to take part in the game, discovering their rules and make their own free associations. Production History: Tactile Paths Festival - Kontraglang on the 8 of January 2017, in Heimathafen Berlin - Artists: Christopher Williams - Double bass, Edith Buttingsrud Pedersen - dance, Roberta Ricci dance, Michael Thieke clarinet, Jadi Carboni, dance and Burkhard Beins light design and electronics Video: https://vimeo.com/234589954 Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.jadicarboni.com

JadiCarboni@JadiCarboni https://www.facebook.com/Jadi9 Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 72 73 Photo: Hiro Ugaya Jesse Glass (Shin-Urayasu, Japan)

Jesse Glass is a poet, dramatist, artist, performance poet, conceptual and performance artist, who has performed his work in Japan, Korea, the U.K., the USA, and Holland (Maastricht, Poli Poetry Festi- val). His visual work is archived at Tate, Britain. He has adhered to Blake’s “Mental Fight” since he was fifteen years old.

Disciplines: Performance, Poetry, Conceptual, Art, Conceptual, Poetry

Examples One (Trope Event) and Two (“Imagine ‘The Ghost of a Flea’ Event”

Examples One and Two:

Trope Event

1. I will read a moderately long poem. After I read each page, I will destroy it in some ritualistic fashion: tear it up, perhaps set it afire.

2. After the destruction is complete, I will pass out pencils and paper and ask the audience to write down--resurrect as it were, from the cooling ashes--what they recall of the content of the destroyed poem.

3. I will collect the papers from the audience and read the new text back to them. In this way the original text will be rescued from nothingness, & given a new body.

4. The life of the poem resides in the middle ground between trope & memory.

Example Two:

“Imagine ‘The Ghost of a Flea’ Event”

1) Imagine it. 2) Imagine it. 3) Say: a) “I am imagining it.” Then: b) “It was imagined.”

Jesse Glass

Production History: Poli Poetry Festival, Maastricht, Woodland Pattern Book Center, Milwaukee, Sogang University, Seoul, Essex University, U.K., The Bury Art Museum, U.K.

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/3010

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 74 75 Photo: Geir Dokken Jørgen Frederik Scheel Haarstad (Oslo, Norway)

I am an artist, musician, drummer and composer.

I have a background from the comercial music industry wich I was a part of for 20 years. It affects me in my work with ceramics. Energetic pumping rock¬¥n roll is my daily engine and is closest to the heart. I also like jazz, pop, metal, classical and contemporary music. To me, music is a must to produce my art. No music, no work. My MA project at the Oslo National Academy of The Arts was focused on experimentation, primarily with ceramics as audiovisual material, ie for the production of audio objects, visual shapes, as material for use in installations and for performance. After finishing my MA in 2015, I have continued to work in the field of ceramic sound production, installation and performance.

Disciplines: Ceramic Performance, Artist I went into another room.

The fascination of getting sound out of objects around me arose early. I have been hitting/drumming on all imaginable objects from early age and discovered the peculiarities and distinctiveness of various objects. I still do that. With my experience it has led the mind to how you can get “pictures” in your head of what sound is. When I am working with contemporary music, I experience sound like materiality, color and shape. Using visual and tactile terms makes it easier to understand a description of what you hear and feel. My main work is done at Norwegian Technical Porcelain (NTP) in Fredrikstad., Norway. NTP produces high voltage insulators. I’ve been working there with my ceramic production since 2013. I explore and experiment with NTP’s misproduction and waste material. The goal and drive of my next production is to develop the expression within NTP’s tight framework of already completed porcelain elements. To develop the visual (use of given form/glaze), sound, performance, choreography and cinematographic performance. Humans can not hear below 20 Hz. My sound works have a range from 9 Hz to 17,000 Hz, which makes it not just a hearing experience, but also a physical experience. My passion for music is not just about drums, percussion and rock’n’roll. To me there is also a “visual” form of speech in sound and music. I’m interested in how audio sound can affect our state of mind.

I am looking at my audio productions as sound collages, floating form and soundscapes.

Production History: National Museum, Oslo, Norway

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tI5hikAd3ZE

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.jorgenhaarstad.com

@Performing-JHaarstad

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 76 77 Photo: Ioulia Ladigianni Katerina Drakopoulou (Athens, Greece)

Katerina Drakopoulou is an actress, Butoh dancer, and physical theatre/dance trainer. Following her studies (BA in Drama and Theatre Studies, University of Kent; MA in Performance, Goldsmiths College; MA in Ensemble Physical Theatre, University of Huddersfield), she worked as a Lecturer at various universities in England. In 2010, she took the leap and returned to Athens, Greece where she has been focusing on making performance work.

Her practice places emphasis upon the relationship between time, space, and body and attempts to expose an intense personal place of vulnerability that paradoxically unveils an uncanny power. The work, which embraces the play with sculptural forms and includes the use of masks, costumes, and objects, is profoundly rooted in Japanese Butoh and involves slow movement, energetic stillness, and poetic imagery that comes from a deep instinctual place. The aim is to communicate on a sensory level, not only to reveal that which is less tangible, non-linear, and visually arresting, but also to illuminate the ordinary and the accidental. Site-specificity and performance in non-traditional spaces are at the heart of her work that involves questions about the different dynamics by which the body may perme- ate a space or may be absorbed by its surroundings. Through her works, she attempts to capture and enhance the beauty of the everyday and invite communities to see again and re-imagine shared spaces, practices, and art forms.

Disciplines: Performance, Butoh, Site-Specific, Improvisation, Dance, Walking 22 stops

“22 stops” is a solo, long durational, site-specific, Butoh performance project that attempts to explore the relationship between the body and the environment and ultimately the interplay between Inner/ Outer, Self/Other, Private/Public, Live/Mediated, Ephemeral/Eternal.

During a long durational walk, the Butoh body traces the landscape and dances the topos. 22 improvisational Butoh dance compositions, which place particular emphasis on the possibilities of distilled movement and the processes of transformation, are created and performed in 22 sites within the walk. The ‘mapping’ of the dialogue between the Butoh body and the public space is documented via photography.

This performative journey of “22 sites, 22 dances” is subsequently “re-traced” and performed in an indoor space.

The indoor performance involves a video projection of the photographs capturing the performative walk and through a process of remembering, re-enacting, and re-creating, attempts to bring the outdoors inside and ultimately interrogate the boundaries of corporeality of body/space/ time, and the forms of experience.

”22 stops” is about giving people the opportunity to see the world with “fresh eyes”, to appreciate parts of the environment that they might have overlooked, and perhaps to connect with themselves and the world around them in a more profound level.

Production History: “In Progress Feedback Festival”, Athens; “Athens Photo Festival 2016”; “Visions – V Ideas, Performances” 3rd Edition Festival, Athens; “Compartments Dance Project” at the Railway Carriage Theater, Athens; Romantso within Athens ANIMFEST, MULTIMATION; Delphi within ANIMART 2017; “Kapani Project” in Thessaloniki; “Petit Paris d’Athènes Festival”.

Contact: [email protected] Website: https://22stops.com/

https://www.facebook.com/22stops/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 78 79 Photo: Ernesto Artillo KOR’SIA (Madrid, Spain)

Antonio de Rosa and Mattia Russo, together with Giuseppe Dagostino, are KOR’SIA, a collective that arose from the need to use the body to communicate, and to make themselves visible as creators and performers.The three exude an inner urgency to exploit a language, that of the body, which tran- scends the limits of verbal communication.The risk of the unexplored is the inertia that inspires their creation, incorporating elements from film, photography, literature and sculpture as references for new forms of expression.

Within a realty where our consciousness is fragmented, subdivided into strains of silence and sound, movement and quiet, it is the silence of life that dictates the path of the three members of KOR’SIA, who are united by their professional dialogue. They yearn to create and express their opinions and emotions, and through them cause the audience to fall in love, leave their cares at home, and enjoy a refreshing and new experience. The KOR’SIA project is both ambitious and difficult, but its principal goal is to partake in an international professional adventure with a long future.

Disciplines: Choreography, Dance, Theatre, Storytelling, Video Art, In Situ Human

HUMAN (FIGHTS–RIGHTS-LIGHTS) is a play conceived in three acts by the Italian artist Um- berto Ciceri. It could be defined as a polyphonic opera, whose profound text evokes the thirty articles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The three stages of the play are mentioned in the title: Experience, Knowledge, and Conscience. Each of the stages is formed into an epic cycle that constantly tries to transform and renew itself. The narrative technique is not limited to relating society’s development from a western point of view. From the mists of time we rediscover the Sumerian, Persian, Hindu and African civilizations. In HUMAN the thirty articles of the declaration are sung to Bach’s choral music and choreographed by Korsia’s unmistakable dance language in search of what these rights attempt to achieve: respect, equilibrium and a state of grace. HUMAN is an ideal piece to bring dance closer to the general public. Moreover, the nature of the main theme makes it a project very suitable to get students from secondary schools, conservatories, and dance or music schools involved.

Production History: Tetaros del Canal, Madrid

Video: https://vimeo.com/233108823

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.kor-sia.com

@korsiakorsia https://www.facebook.com/korsiakorsia/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 80 81 Photo: Christian Rockefeller Logan K. Young (Washington, D.C., USA)

A reformed child actor from South Carolina, Logan K. Young grew up playing in, writing for and de facto leading power trios, opera pits, the dais at Medieval Times and multiple Rocky Horror tribute tours. While at the Governor’s School for and the University of his home state, he focused on trum- pet, composition and conducting—summering at festivals such as Brevard, Tanglewood and Bang on a Can. Later studies include coursework with the late German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and Thurston Moore at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Author of chapbooks, liner notes and song lyrics, Young’s work has been published everywhere from NPR to the Baltimore Sun, Industrial Worker to Lambda Literary, UPenn’s Jacket2 to 3:AM and anthologized as far flung as That Devil Music: Best Rock Writing (Excitable Press), An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting (Uitgeverij), AT&T’s On-line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences and Library of the Printed Web, Vol. 3. Mean- while, his books on Mauricio Kagel and La Monte Young can be found only in the most discerning of discount bins. (Logan’s been written about, too, in the Guardian, Bookforum and the Poetry Founda- tion’s “Harriet” blog.) Recent exhibitions include shows at Sediment Arts (Richmond, VA), Labor (Mexico City), Den Frie (Copenhagen) and Brooklyn Art Library. Young has won an Annenberg/ Getty Fellowship to that other USC, shared a Bessie, been nominated for a Pushcart and shortlisted for the Best Album Notes Grammy. He lives just outside Suffragette City, in Washington’s harDCore suburbs.

Disciplines: Dance, Multimedia, Music, Performance Art, Theatre, Writing

Ear Inn

As close to the original bank of the Hudson River as is allowed…

Now, imagine Edward Gordon Craig proposing an idea that George Maciunas should appear in a ballet—sometimes as a man and sometimes as a girl. Looking a lot like his mother, eyepatch and all, he should embody the ideal figure of a woman in the following Lacanotation:

Maciunas and a corps of adolescent girls come from the Hudson. Together, they form a circle which threatens to mingle with another circle of boys. They are not entirely formed beings; their sex is single and double, like that of the tree. The groups continue to try to mingle, but in their rhythms, one feels the cataclysm of a discrete group about to form. In fact, they divide right and left.

It is the realization of form, the synthesis of rhythms and the thing nearly formed—itself—that produces a new rhythm.

…It’d be nice if it were raining, too.

Production History: Invisible Dog Arts Center (Brooklyn, NY); Pyramid Atlantic Art Center (Silver Spring, MD); House of Softcore (Columbia, SC)

Video: https://vimeo.com/240228407

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://yonoise.tumblr.com/

@logankyoung https://www.facebook.com/logankyoung Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 82 83 Photo: Elazar C. Harel Lucia August/EveryBody Can Dance (Oakland, USA)

I am a choreographer, performer and dance educator from the San Francisco Bay Area, California. For many decades, I encountered tremendous resistance in the dance world regarding my larger-than- average dancer’s body. At age 50, I freed myself of negative beliefs to dance professionally. I have shown my work locally and internationally.

Leading edge themes inform my work and override beliefs that dancers must stop dancing because of artificial limits. By my very presence on stage, I encourage the audience to take seriously a dance artist of age and size. I have proven that dancers need not be restrained by restrictive attitudes imposed on them by others. Since I liberated myself from confining cultural attitudes, I serve as an inspiration to others to continue making art for as long as they want. By witnessing my performances, people are stimulated to expand their ideas of who can make evocative dance. My work motivates others to live their dreams.

I express my truth using intimate storytelling through movement and spoken word. My work centers upon questioning assumptions; challenging expectations; opposing restrictions and celebrating inclu- siveness. These are the principles at work in my platform of Lucia August/Everybody Can Dance. My wish is for the audience to take away an appreciation for movement that is sourced from a non-traditional dancer’s body, re-evaluate what constitutes beautiful and compelling dance and step away from limited thinking about what is an appropriate aged and sized dancer. I am interested in solo work that speaks from the body.

Disciplines: Dance, Movement, Spoken Word, Performance standingOUTstanding “standingOUTstanding” is the name of my variety show which features intimate storytelling in movement and spoken word. The variety show was presented at the Fringe Festival Edinburgh, Scotland in 2014 and in 2017. The performance video from one of the 2014 Fringe Festival shows is housed in the Fringe Performance Archives at the National Library of Scotland. The show has also been seen at ODC Theater, San Francisco, CA and SAFEhouse for the Arts, San Francisco, CA in 2016.

The audience goes on an emotional journey with me. During two sections, there is a small interactive part. Each piece is distinct from the other but there is a common thread of self-reflection, exploration of new and old ideas, breaking free from tradition: self or other-imposed.

PROGRAM Parallel Lives: what happens when previously non-convergent lives merge into one Consistent Paradox: a story about a man with a secret that everyone knows but pretends not to Backward: Why do we always push ourselves to go to the next thing? Why do we torment ourselves to continually go forward? What happens if we stop?

They Never Really Leave: Do those we love never leave us? Forty-year-old cassette tapes unexpectedly surface. The recorded voices are mine and a long lost college love’s. The phrase “long lost” is not only figurative but literal; that lover vanished in 1983. She was never seen or heard from again. Until now. Video: www.youtube.com/luciaaugust Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.luciaaugustdance.com

@joinmedancing https://www.facebook.com/joinmedancing Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 84 85 Photo: Ryan Carollo Luminarium Dance Company (Boston, MA, U.S.A.)

Luminarium Dance Company is an award-winning contemporary dance company now in its seventh season. Founded by Merli V. Guerra and Kimberleigh A. Holman in Boston in 2010, the company is regularly hailed for its unique combination of dance and light. Luminarium’s mission is two-fold, stemming from the word “luminary” (n. 1. a body that gives off light 2. sheds light on some subject or enlightens mankind). The company has performed its repertory in venues ranging from New York City to California. Key venues include: The Boston Opera House, American Repertory Theater’s OBERON, Boston Center for the Arts, Mobius Alternative Arts Space, UMass Fine Arts Center, Mount Holyoke College, Outside the Box, the WGBH Boston Summer Arts Weekend (MA); Sea- coast Fringe Festival (NH); Southern Vermont Dance Festival (VT); Ithaca College, Jennifer Muller/ The Works (NY/NYC); Wiscasset Art Walk (ME); Grounds for Sculpture (NJ); and the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles (CA).

Luminarium stands as one of Boston’s strongest companies, and continues to expand its community programming in addition to engaging a wider range of artists of all disciplines to join the company in developing new projects across Greater Boston. Luminarium is more than a dance company. It was born as a new outlet for performing arts. It is a think tank, a museum, a gallery for contemporary dance and for contemporary ideas, and we welcome you to join the experience.

Disciplines: Modern/Contemporary Dance, Performance, Film, Interdisciplinary, Site-Specific, Commu- nity Engagement

The Landing Party

In 2016, Luminarium was commissioned to create the opening act for TEDxCambridge—the largest TED Talks event in the world—which debuted June 2016, at the Boston Opera House to an audience of 2,600. The five-minute work featured choreography by Merli V. Guerra and Kimberleigh A. Hol- man, with original sound by Christos Zevos, and projections by Samo (Illuminus, Masary Studios). It was so well received that Guerra and Holman spent two years developing this short piece into an evening-length production. Excerpts are available for showing at festivals and events beginning Janu- ary 2018, and the full work will begin touring May 2018. The production makes its Boston debut at the Multicultural Arts Center September 2018.

The work is a contemporary dance performance centered around seven characters who enter the space as a single amoeba—a swaying huddle of bodies, gradually splitting apart until all seven have individu- ally ventured into the light. Before them lies a bright red circle, reminiscent of an activation button calling for attention and action. Curiosity drives them to poke and prod it, until ultimately uniting as a colony to conquer it, leaping into the darkness. A single character successfully lands on the circle, and ultimately ushers the rest through it as a portal to a new land—proffering the opportunity new to build a utopian society. From here, the characters’ relationships begin to unfold for better or worse. As the set continues to physically grow and shape-shift across the space, so too do the performers push their interactions to the brink.

The show runs roughly one hour, with original sound by Zevos.

Production History: TEDxCambridge, Boston Opera House, Boston, MA (2016) / Portal, Boston University Dance Theater, Boston, MA (2016) / Green Street Studios, Cambridge, MA (2017) Video: http://www.luminariumdance.org/almanac2018 Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.luminariumdance.org/almanac2018 @luminariumdance https://www.facebook.com/LuminariumDance Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 86 87 Photo: Zsófia Hevér MA•ZE (Budapest, Hungary)

MA•ZE represents a series of dance projects created in collaboration with it’s dancers and with international artists.

It is the lovechild of dance artists Nagy Emese, Jessica Simet and Kristóf Várnagy. Their goal is to keep exploring the possibilities of creating quality work that is accessible for all ages and backgrounds. With an open mind, they strive to collaborate with international artists and have an interest in creating interdisciplinary performances that lie beyond the conventual frame of the Hungarian dance scene.

MA•ZE embodies fearless physicality, which is grounded by deep humanity and with a pinch of cheekiness is expressed through the madness and joy of the imagination.

Disciplines: Dance, Choreography, Education, Tutoring

Give In

The piece deals with intimacy and how the artists and the audience exist in the place that they share together. The setting is a circle, the audience sits on pillows and chairs around the performers. It is a very extrovert and open performance, where we investigate and experiment with the attitude of the audience, how they react if we cross the borders of their private space, how they feel if they have to react to something that happens to them, how they can feel that they are a part of what is happening during the show. We try not to keep any threshold between the performers and the audience, and we are curious of their final opinion once the show has ended, as it has never been the same. The main concept behind the performance is how we can benefit and make an advantage out of a circumstance which is purely vulnerable for both of the performers and the audience as they sit around us in a 4-meter diameter circle.

Creators, performers: Emese Nagy, Jessica Simet, Kristóf Várnagy

Supporters: Artus, Sín Kulturális Központ, Műhely Alapítvány

Production History: Artus Budapest, MU Theater Budapest, Thealter Festival Szeged, Poszt Pécs, KulturSzett Miskolc

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUM-eWwcxL4

Contact: [email protected]

Website: https://mazedancecompany.wixsite.com/mysite

https://www.facebook.com/mazedanceco/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 88 89 Photo: Andrea Tiziani Maladype Theatre (Budapest, Hungary)

Maladype Theatre -founded in 2001- is an independent theatre company based in Budapest, Hungary. The company, comprising of a team of resident artists, theatre practitioners and creatives is constantly reinventing itself. Maladype has also developed a unique language and methodology that is not only understood by its artists but also by its ever growing audience. Playfulness, acting and reacting is the essential part of Maladype Theatre. Enthusiastic risk-taking and creative experimentation are elementary part of the company’s work. It relentlessly seeks extraordinary situations, generating new perceptions and embracing natural elements as organic component of theatre making. The distinctive characteristic of each individual piece is its capability to adapt according to the cultural, physical-emotional context depending on the location and setting of any given performance. This makes the shows accessible to all. Maladype Theatre has a wide range of productions from intimate chamber dramas (Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom) through improvisational and interactive plays (Sáry’s Great Sound in the Rush) to large-scale performances (Vörösmarty’s Csongor and Tünde), from literary classics (Shakespeare’s Richard III, Chekhov’s Three sisters) through modern and contemporary absurd plays (Genet’s The Balcony, Vi≈üniec’s Dada Cabaret) as well as site-specific performances or reader’s theatre events. Maladype has received numerous awards, has toured both nationally and internationally (including countries like India, Iran and the US), and is led by Artistic Director Zoltán Balázs.

Disciplines: Theatre, Performance, Music, Research, Workshop, Interdisciplinary

Great Sound in the Rush Great Sound in the Rush is a contemporary “semi-seria opera” by composer László Sáry, an amusing and hypnotizing flow of creativity with Sándor Weöres’s linguistic masterpiece, a semantic nonsense, “Theme and Variations” in the focus. The production won the Artisjus Award for Classical Music in 2016. Great Sound in the Rush is a perfect encounter of words, music and the virtuosity of the performers.

According to the definition, in a semi-serious opera everything happens differently from what we are used to, yet, all that is required for a chamber opera is given: overture, 12 acts, arias, recitatives, cho- ruses and a finale. The closing pieces are games based on Sáry’s collection of Creative Musical Exercis- es. Besides their main instrument performers play on various stones, teak, and other creative rhythmic instruments. Staged by Zoltán Balázs, Artistic Director of Maladype, the performance is realized through the collaboration between Maladype Theatre and Qaartsiluni Ensemble. Balázs’s creative relationship with Sáry began with the acclaimed stage adaptation of the composer’s oratorio Theomachia (by Sándor Weöres) in 2003 which was presented in several Hungarian and international festivals.

”...the happenings are so delightfully diverse, unexpected, adolescent, inspired, erotic, comical, human, surprising that it is entirely hopeless to illustrate it orally in their concreteness. But, take my word, every minute of the performance is enjoyable and fascinating. This brilliant implementation is thanks to the eight earnest musicians and actors.” (Malina: Traditions and Chang

Production History: Shakespeare Theatre, Gdańsk, Poland – 2017 / S≈Çu≈ºewski Dom Kultury Warsawa, Poland - 2017 / Central European Theatre Festival, Kosice, Slovakia - 2017 / Théâtre Saint- Gervais, Geneva, Switzerland - 2017 / House of Arts, Kisvárda, Hungary - 2016 / MUSIK THE- ATER TAGE WIEN Festival, Vienna, Austria - 2016 / Valley of Arts, Taliándörögd, Hungary - 2016 / Chamber Opera Festival, Eger, Hungary - 2015 / √ìbudai Társaskör, Budapest - 2015 / National Theatre, Miskolc, Hungary - 2015 / Harmadik Színház, Pécs, Hungary - 2005

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdUApGaTvRs&t=137s Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.maladype.hu/en/

@MaladypeS https://www.facebook.com/Maladype/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 90 91 Photo: Nicci Bailey Mark Rautenbach (Cape Town, South Africa)

Hello my name is Mark Rautenbach. I’m a middle-aged, white, queer man living and working in Cape Town, South Africa.

Art making is a primary language that my inner and outer worlds communicate with the conundrum of me, myself and I. Art production is such an integral part of my being human that ‘Human Being- ness’ becomes the Work.

My work interrogates the fabric of identity [what it is made from; sexuality, narratives, otherness, race, appearance relationships to other beings and place] and doesn’t land comfortably with any finite categorisation.

My concerns and commitments are eco/ethical practices of wellbeing. These are things I practice daily, as in good habits.

The practices are as fundamental as getting good nutrition and quality sleep to making sculpture from detritus [generated from my being] that which cannot be composted and recycled, to being sterilized as a contribution to curb population. Performances enables my work to engage with immediate social impact, developing conversations in specific places with beings [not only human] which inhabit these places, and whose identities may [albeit temporarily] be somehow defined by these spaces. [E.g. people and trees at an academic seminar].

I approach making and performing from un-knowing. It thus only through the making and embodiment that the ‘matter’ becomes apparent.

Plainly put I make sculptures from my waste and salvaged material. I knit in site-specific places, wear- ing specific outfits, knitting with specific yarns. I make 2D assemblages from other people’s memora- bilia, documents and photos. I use my skin

Disciplines: Live Art, Sculpture, Yarn Making, Menditations De:ising Over 3 months I performed 4 pieces which are collectively called De:ising [de-colon-ising]. This is an ongoing series. The pieces are my contribution and absurdist critique of the current ‘Decolonization’ movement.

All 5 pieces have a common action as a central focus; the making of yarn by meticulously tearing a continuous thread from pages of specific books. The books relate to the content and the specific sites. The content examines agents of colonisation; geographic territory, language and systems of knowledge. Yarn making is an absurdist pun on spinning yarns; making stories, making new stories, making new stories from old stories. The books used are an atlas in FATHERLAND, an Oxford English dictionary in MOTHERTONGUE and The Encyclopaedia Britannica in DAWNING NEW NARRATIVES/ COLDEST BEFORE THE DAWN.

The sites relate in some way to a colonial story.

In all 4 pieces the meticulous tearing of pages into continuous thread are what I term menditations: actions which are mending, making amends, meditative, transforming and sitting with. The pieces long durational and are rather boring to observe. In Fatherland I sit with my legs buried up to my knees in the veld. The others I sit cross legged making yarn and make one full rotation on the same spot, over 90 minutes.

The pieces are performed to the geography, site and seasons as audience/witness. There is a disregard of people as audience, although in FATHERLAND there was a delightful conversation with the people audience.More information is available on http://decolonising.blogspot.co.za

Production History: Iziko South African National Gallery, Orpheus Institute Ghent, University of Cape Town Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU_hTy7HQY0&feature=youtu.be Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.markrautenbach.com

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 92 93 Photo: Mark Loudon Mary Pearson / Mpearsonater (Liverpool, UK)

I am a multi disciplinary performance maker currently based in Liverpool, UK. Since 2012 I have created solo works FoMO, mofos!, The Sand Dog Cometh, and FAILURE (& other opportunities for nonlinear success), which have toured internationally in the UK, USA, and Germany. My signature improvisation and performance workshops are called FAILURE Lab.

My work deals with delicate and uncomfortable edges of belonging. Originally from the US, I have lived outside the country for 15 years. I relate my transnational life to my trans-disciplinary art practice. My insider/outsider perspective crosses borders and lingers at edges between art forms and across the senses. I make body-based performance collages that mix tropes from pop culture, stage, performance art, somatics and post modern dance. I use voice and video, flamboyant costumes and ridiculous personas, comedy with feminist social commentary.

Past works themes were failure, consumerism and gender performance, critiquing the cultivation of self and body as marketable products.

I have trained, performed, mentored, and curated at Ponderosa Movement & Discovery (Germany) P.O.R.C.H. performance summer school, and Con|VERGE collaborative performance residency. I teach improvisation as a visiting artist in contemporary UK performance departments, and venues such as contactfestival freiburg (Ger- many), WCCIJam, PADL West (CA, USA), Summerhall, Live Art Bistro, Goldsmiths (UK).

I earned a BA in Visual Art / English Literature, with dance, from Oberlin College, (USA) and studied physical theatre creation at Kiklos Teatro (Italy). Disciplines: Dance, Theatre, Performance Art, Video, Installation, Improvisation FoMO, mofos! (Fear of Missing Out, Mother***ers!)

Enter here and now. How did we get here? How do we get down from here?

With social media hyper-connectivity comes constant vigilance: we are watching each other whilst being watched.

FoMO, mofos! questions the deeper consequences of continuous self exposure on the fragile psyche of human animals. It explores constructed and projected identities, the profound restlessness that arises from global mobility, and human society’s alienation from nature and our animal selves.

The performance is a ‘kaleidoscopic meditation’ that passes through films Blow-Up and Mullholland Drive and songs by Robert Wyatt, Kraftwerk and John Lennon.

Audience are surprised as a powerful image world comes to life, where real-time dances and songs blend into immersive music video backgrounds. Dark karaoke cabaret, provocative poetic texts, and outrageous costumes disrupt.

Animal imagery throughout expresses biological responses to seeing and being seen: display, threat, desire, shame. How is desire multiplied though screen use, with our enhanced ability to ‘see’ into other worlds and possibilities? Human attempts to contain and control the natural world with technology, when taken to a menacing extreme, can become a desire to dominate space and time itself.

Via cult film references, audience travel through retro technologies into a ‘digital age state of being’. Antonioni’s Blow Up captures images and invades privacy, Lynch’s Mulholland Drive blurs identities and brings amnesia, and a Tarantino-inspired female killer places the fantasy world into the collective subconscious of here and now.

Production History: Unity Theatre (Liverpool), DanceKiosk 48-hour Nomads (Hamburg), MDI LEAP festival (Liverpool), The Arts Centre at Edge Hill University, Chisenhale Dance Space (London), The Living Room (Port- land, ME), Finnish Hall (Berkeley, CA), Waterside Arts Centre (Sale), Plymouth University Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.mpearsonater.com

@mpearsonater

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 94 95 Photo: Upper Image: Robin Fast, Lower Image: Denisa Kraus Meridian (Nanaimo, BC, Canada)

Meridian is Robin Davies, Kevin Mazutinec, Justin McGrail, and Marian van der Zon; four Vancou- ver Island artists, who share their passions and performance skills to create an experimental, immersive experience. Performances combine prepared material and improvisational elements, making each event unique to its time and location. Meridian is a multimedia exploration of technology, humanity, and their offspring. Digital technologies, computer-based animation, and live performance combine in events that feature projected-video, ambient-electronic soundscapes, acoustic and electric instruments, looped and processed vocals, and spoken word poetry. Meridian is a collaboration that began in Janu- ary 2012, resulting in a 60-minute performance presented in March 2012 at Nanaimo’s Malaspina Theatre. Since then the project has grown to include a second, hour-long performance work, and has seen the members participate in numerous public talks and performances. A third performance work is currently under development.

Disciplines: Performance Art, Video, Electroacoustic Performance, Spoken Word, Immersive Experience, Multimedia

Meridian: A Multimedia Performance Event

“We view performances as iterative publications, meaning that the components in the work are continuously formed, nurtured, and revised at the individual and team level. Each step of the team’s process – including work-shopping, rehearsal, gigging, and reacting to diverse audiences and venues – allows for instantaneous exploration and meditation necessary for individual growth as artists. Reflec- tive process is inherent in Meridian’s collaborative creativity.” – Robin Davies

“Those who are affected the most by Meridian will have almost nothing to say. It consists of dramatic abstract scenery of digital video art, combined with an electronic soundscape. It is rich with pulsat- ing rhythm, organic sounding effects and digitally manipulated vocals and instruments. The wall of audiovisual abstraction is balanced by the performance of a spoken word artist on stage. The mood is dark, dense, and devoid of a traditional narrative. Instead, the creators craft a meditative ambiance and invite us to reconsider what we expect from our own perception. What you get from Meridian is about you.” – Denisa Kraus

Production History: Tribute Communities Recital Hall (York University, Toronto, ON, Canada), Cinecenta (University of Victoria, BC, Canada), Malaspina Theatre (VIU, Nanaimo, BC, Canada), OCAD University (Toronto, ON, Canada), NAISA Space (Toronto, ON, Canada), The Factory Me- dia Centre (Hamilton, ON, Canada), Open Space (Victoria, BC, Canada), Rifflandia HQ (Victoria, BC, Canada), CVAG Black Box (Courtenay, BC, Canada), The Roxy Theatre (Gabriola Island, BC, Canada), The White Room (Nanaimo, BC, Canada)

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6fazKEm3ZY

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.meridian.is

https://www.facebook.com/meridianfun Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 96 97 Photo: Botticelli Molissa Fenley and Company (New York City, USA)

Molissa Fenley (1954) founded Molissa Fenley and Company in 1977 and has since created over 85 dance works during her continuing career. She grew up in Ibadan, Nigeria traveling there with her family in 1961, completing all of her early education there in International Schools and her last two years of school in Spain. She returned to the US in 1971 to study dance at Mills College in Oakland, CA. Upon graduation in 1975, she moved to New York. With her company and as a soloist working in collaboration with visual artists and composers, she has performed throughout the US, Canada, South America, Europe, Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Her work has been commissioned by the American Dance Festival, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, the Dia Art Foundation, Jacob’s Pillow, the Joyce Theater, Lincoln Center, the New National Theater of Tokyo, The National Institute of Performing Arts in Seoul, The Kitchen and by DTW/New York Live Arts. Both Cenotaph and State of Darkness were awarded a Bessie for Cho- reography in 1985 and 1988 respectively. Molissa has also created many works on ballet and contemporary dance companies, is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and has enjoyed residencies at the Baryshnikov Art Center, the Bogliasco Foundation, Djerassi, TopazArts and Yaddo. Molissa is the Danforth Professor of Dance at Mills College and often teaches at other Colleges and Universities. Seagull Press recently published Rhythm Field: The Dance of Molissa Fenley.

Disciplines: Dance, Contemporary, Music, Art, Live, Performance

Water Table

Molissa Fenley has a long history of creating choreographic works inspired by environmental issues. Molissa has been creating visionary work since the 1980’s, responding creatively to environmental crises and fostering awareness of pertinent climate issues with her audiences. Water Table is Molissa’s most recent artistic response to the very significant decrease in the amount of accumulated fresh water available in our world. The dances of Water Table present the qualities of water, the abundance or lack of pure water in a geographical area, or the conditions and patterns of large bodies of water.

1. Sargasso Sea - Music by Andrew Toovey, Your Mouth

2. Mali - Music by Frank Cassara

3. The Pattern of the Surface - Music by Tigran Mansurian, Tagh to Crucifixion, Tagh to Funeral, Tagh to Resurrection

Production History: Ailey Citigroup Theater, The Bargello Museum (Italy), NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Mills College, Vassar College, Stanford University, Railyard Performance Center, The Dance Barn, New York Live Arts, SAFEhouse for the Performing Arts, Montecito Ballet School, Days and Nights Festival

Video: https://vimeo.com/user2966091

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.molissafenley.com

@molissafenley https://www.facebook.com/MolissaFenleyandCompany/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 98 99 Photo: Sarah Midkiff Molly Joyce (Pittsburgh, USA)

I am active a composer and performer, and my work is primarily concerned with physical impairment not only as a creative source, but artistic process that pursues an individual lens to a greater truth. As I have a physically-impaired left hand due to a previous car accident, it is incredibly important to me to engage with the impairment artistically as well as personally.

My primary vehicle for exploring and engaging with my impairment is my electric vintage toy organ, a 1960s instrument which I bought on eBay about five years ago and has ever since become a primary focus in my work. I find the organ in incredibly inspiring artistic vehicle not only for its unique sound, but also for its physical makeup that I feel allows me to engage with my impairment on an artistic level. Through the instrument I have performed extensively solo and with other collaborators, including dancers, visual artists, and beat-boxers. The vast variety of artists and thinkers that the organ brings me into conversation with is incredibly important to my artistic work, and thus I often seek opportunities which allow me to incorporate the instrument.

Why I make the work I do is perhaps a constantly evolving and transforming question and answer process for me personally, professionally, and artistically. However at the root of such purpose I find that what moves me the most is if I can consistently lend myself and my work towards redefining how impairments in the human body - how they are defined, imagined, and ultimately viewed without comparison.

Disciplines: Music, Performance, Sound

Form and Deform

Form and Deform represents a continuation in the composing and performing on my favorite instrument, the Magnus electric toy organ. Bought on eBay about five years ago, this instrument is completely vintage and has continued to provide me musical inspiration ever since. Besides my love of the unique sound and tuning that the instrument produces, I also feel that it physically fits my body as a performer very well. I have a weak left hand, and thus the setup of the toy organ of chord buttons on the left and the keyboard portion of the instrument on the right personally feels very comfortable for me to perform on.

Therefore with the works in the set, I wanted to challenge the limits and interaction between my different hands to see what happens with circumstances such as the two supplanting one another’s roles or becoming uniform/unison gestures.

The audience experiences the work as a live musical performance, however I also hope that they feel free to explore and experience the performance as not only to be heard or viewed, but as an artistic expression to be engaged with and interpreted throughout.

Production History: TEDxMidAtlantic, Garner Arts Center, ArtCenter/ South Florida, Skowhegan Awards Dinner, Yale School of Art, Angel Orensanz Foundation, Yale Center for British Art

Video: https://youtu.be/LhNZsErx_NY Contact: [email protected] Website: http://mollyjoycemusic.com/

@molly_joyce https://www.facebook.com/mollysjoyce Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 100 101 Photo: Skye Morse-Hodgson Nettles Artists Collective (New York NY, USA)

Nettles Artists Collective is a NYC-based artists collective run by two Latinas, Debora Balardini and Sandie Luna. The company has been devising original works using physical theater and visual arts for the past twelve years forging leadership and amplification of inclusion in the arts. The Nettles imbue the American art scene with authentic, global voices and multidisciplinary collaborations by providing a platform for the performing and visual arts. We make are to celebrate differences and add to the growth of our audience’s spirit.

Nettles Artists was founded in 2005 and ever since they have created works in different mediums ranging from film, theatre, and visual arts. Some of the highlights are: Four Legged Melancholy, a physical theatre piece presented as part of the International lineup of the Fringe Festival de Teatro de Curitiba 2012 (Brazil); Apple of My Eye/Menina dos Meus Olhos directed by Debora Balardini and conceived by Sandie Luna. The show is the first ever professionally produced play written and performed by an actress with Down syndrome and it was presented in support of ending violence against children and adolescents with disabilities at UNICEF on March 21, 2016 World Down Syndrome Day; A House of Skin and Bone, in 2016, inspired by the book The Dark Cave Between My Ribs by Loren Kleinman directed by Sandie Luna and Montserrat Vargas; And Bother Line (2017) conceived and performed by Gio Mielle, directed by Debora Balardini. NAC is currently a resident of PUNTO - An Events and Performance Space in Manhattan. www.nettlesartists.com | www.punto.com.

Disciplines: Performance Art, Visual Art, Theatre, Physical Theatre, Film, Bother Line

Nettles Artists Collective made this work mainly to support the creative expression and empower women in today’s gender-based society through the Latina feminist lens. Bother Line has continued to explore humanization versus dehumanization and the daily impact it has on our bodies and identities through the writing of Helen Palmer, also known as famed Brazilian author Clarice Lispector. The solo performance is an original piece created and conceptualized by Gio Mielle and directed by Debora Balardini. The audience is able to engage with Gio Mielle’s as she struggles to achieve a perfect “look” as well as when she decides to reconstruct her image by destroying what once gave her the pleasure of being called a woman. From hypocrisy to exposure, from pathetic to poetic, this is the result of Gio Mielle’s discomfort with the lines that make her the woman she is today. Lines, they bother her.

As Latina artists who carry a diverse cultural b of the topic of humanization/dehumanization of the female figure and the daily impact it has on the women’s bodies. We feel compelled to reveal and unmask a lot of the misconceptions that the media creates around what it means to be human for a woman. We have the need to open the doors of discussion about the hypocrisy, the discomfort, the fears and beauty behind the history that our bodies carry. Our desire is to discuss women at their best: free to decide who they want to be.

Production History: This work has been presented at: Punto Space (fall 2017) and The Tank (summer 2017). Both venues in New York City. Video: https://vimeo.com/237140106 password: BL Contact: [email protected] Website: http://nettlesartists.com/

@nettlesartists https://www.facebook.com/nettlesartists Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 102 103 Photo: Impulso Photographie Nettles Artists Collective (New York City, USA)

Nettles Artists Collective imbues the American art scene with authentic, global voices and multidisciplinary collaborations by providing a platform for the performing and visual arts.

Disciplines: Visual Arts, Performing Arts, Physical Theater, Film

Ulysses - Wandering Rocks

A multidisciplinary interpretation of the 19 sessions of the Wandering Rocks episode, directed by Debora Balardini. The piece is a collaboration between visual artist Roberta Fernandes, writer/musician Brendan Smith and performing artists Gio Mielle, Andressa Furletti and Conor Fay. Nettles Art- ists Collective integrates James Joyce’s stream of consciousness style of writing into voice, movement and visual arts and reveals a work of dramatic and comedic depth full of ellipsis, life, and humanity.

The collective created a labyrinth of ideas where the audience is placed inside an installation made of elastics. The fabric work by Roberta Fernandes brings attention to Joyce’s words highlighting the delicate and fragile environment we live in. Nettles’s performance brings to life our individual struggles against social pressure, nationalism versus independence and the question of identity.

Production History: Mathew Gallery NYC

Video: https://vimeo.com/229773833

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://nettlesartists.com

@nettlesartists https://www.facebook.com/nettlesartists Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 104 105 Photo: CARL & Rustaveli State Theatre (official) NINO MAGLAKELIDZE - SHEETS & CARL (TBILISI, GEORGIA)

Nino Maglakelidze - Sheets works in many disciplines Internationally. She is a Visual Artist, Perfor- mance Director and Arts Manager. Researcher – PhD Student at Ilia State University – Tbilisi, GEO. Since- 2013 – Founder & Artistic Director of the CARL Contemporary Arts Research Laboratory. Since – 2011 Founder & Artistic Director of an (24 – hour) Experimental Theatre Festival at the Rustaveli State Theatre -Tbilisi, / Ilia ChavChavadze State, Professional Drama Theatre -Batumi, / Valerian Gunia State, Professional Drama Theatre - Poti. In 2009 & 2010 She get Probated ( as a Scenographer – Stage, Costume , light Designer) at the The Royal National Theatre, London, UK. In 2010 She became a State Department alumni with the - DeVos Institute of Arts Management Fellowship Program at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington DC, USA. Also in 2010 - Nino took the course at the Stagecraft Institute of Las Vegas, USA. 2011 / 2012 She receive the (3) FH (Fulbright -Hays ) grants. 2015 as a Professional Artist Nino was participated in P.Q. Prague Quadrennial – with the performance – Puppet People – Dream (Re- Stage). Nino’s work based on her practical research – to find a new forms in the arts, then made the theoretical analyses for the academic articles. Nino’s new work with the CARLaboratory is -

Report N 080808 (969) - CAUCASIAN REGION .

Production goal is to focused on social art and human rights across the documental performances, an experimental theatre, sound installation, lighting, text and set design.

Disciplines: Theatre, Performance, Artist, Caucasian, Experimental, CARL Report N 080808 (969) - CAUCASIAN REGION

Writing and directing by Nino Maglakelidze - Sheets

New experiment of documentary theatre in the form of sound installation, which better shows the atmosphere in Georgia before the war started in 2008 when Russia occupied the Georgian territories

Production description : After the Soviet Union collapsed the society, having lived with infantilism for 70 years started the re- appraisal of values and seeked out support in this matter from political leaders and foreign diplomats.

Major events before war of very important newest Georgian history develop against the backdrop of a dramatic story between lovers.

During 1 hour audience listened the sound - installation and watched videoart accompanied by live contemporary choreography.

(Original text in Georgian with English subtitles) .

Production History: Work in process: showcase part 1: CAUCASIAN HOUSE 2016. Part 2 : RUSTAVELI STATE THEATRE 2017. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7D1A72U2sE&feature=youtu.be Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.rustavelitheatre.ge/

https://www.facebook.com/Nino.sheets/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 106 107 Photo: Sunčçan Stone Noemi Veberičç Levovnik (Berlin, Germany)

Noemi Veberičç Levovnik (b. 1985, Slovenia) is an interdisciplinary artist, active in the field of performance art, music, visual art, written word and moving image. Noemi completed her Master’s in contemporary visual art, cinema and new media in Paris and Quimper, France. She is currently based in Berlin.

Her work is focused around the feminine, pushing and testing its boundaries, exploring its different forms and telling Her stories, through the sensual, the color, the sound and the body. Her feminine is seen through the perspectives of queer and genre studies.

In the form she works with two poles: a sort of baroque, explosion of shapes and colors, excessive kitsch esthetics, and on the other side a rigorous formal and conceptual purity, existential minimalism. Combining them, she creates a specific personal esthetics, where none of them is compromised by the other, but instead they co-exist.

She finds inspiration in old show forms (vaudeville, circus, burlesque, variete, old Hollywood, cinema) as well as pagan rituals, the female deities, the contemporary pop culture, pin-ups and femmes fatales and depth psychology. Showing what is hidden under the surfaces, she approaches performances from her background in visual arts and cinema, creating her own visual and musical world. It is always a dream-like, hypnotic experience for the viewer, mixed with upfront physicality and transgressive eroticism, pushing the bounderies of what they find acceptable and meandering between laughter and tears.

Disciplines: Performance, Dance, Music, Installation, Video, Visual Art Shades of Blood - stories of the dirty sacred feminine

Born of this theme of feminine, Shades move somewhere between cabaret and performance art, with many visual elements of painting, installation and video. It is a genre hybrid; a bloody, painterly, messy burlesque, as well as a collaborative piece, an open space for others. Lit with strong contrasting colors, which produce similar effects to those of old color printing, and bathing in a very dynamic musical/sound environment, it is creating a sort of pop clubby feel, but with strange and dark under- tone, producing a contrasting experience for the spectator. Opposites coexist and dance together.

Shades are composed of several “numbers” which I perform under different characters (a Cat, two Rabbits, a Fountain...), and which mostly also stand as independent performances. The piece is adaptable in two formats (1 or 2 performers) and several lengths (parts of the show are also independent performance pieces, ranging from 10 to 20 minutes/part, these parts can be presented as solos). Between the numbers, there is empty space, open for the guest/collaborator. The two worlds do not actually interact, they are just exchanging the stage, somehow living together side by side, without touching. Many collaborations are possible; the guest can be a dancer, a DJ, a poet, a performer, a sex worker, a drag queen, an MC, or just a person telling their life story. The first collaborator/guest of the Shades was a clown and contemporary dancer, Gregor Kamnikar. A new collaborator can be found on each new place of performance/residence, so the project is always alive and evolving.

Production History: Pocket Teater, Ljubljana, Slovenia; Španski Borci, Ljubljana, Slovenia (excerpt); Soundacts Festival Athens, Greece (excerpt); Altes Finanzamt, Berlin, Germany (excerpts) Video: http://vimeo.com/216545730 Contact: [email protected] Website: http://noemivebericlevovnik.org

https://www.facebook.com/noemi.vebericlevovnik Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 108 109 Photo: Alessandro Sala OHT | Office for a Human Theatre (Rovereto, Italy)

The Office for a Human Theatre [OHT] takes on from the wish that Google does not answer to all the questions and it investigates reality and its representation without limits in terms of shape, genre and feelings.

It has collaborated nationally and internationally with Artists’ Salon NYC – ONDA (FR), Triennale Teatro dell’Arte Milano (IT), Whitechapel Gallery London (UK), MAXXI museum Rome (IT), Art Basic for Children Bruxelles (BE), Short Theatre Rome (IT), Albers Foundation (USA), Centrale Fies Art Work Space (IT), MART museum (IT) and many more.

Icon Design magazine stated that OHT springs up from the will of making the abstract concrete while Italian newspaper la Republica defined OHT as one of the most interesting company of the independent scene.

Disciplines: Theatre, Installation, Performance, Visual Arts Project Mercury

Sara and Chiara train to become astronauts. They are going to tackle what is an actual space odyssey. The inability to affirm themselves is concealed in every gesture and word of theirs. However, they don’t give up and they fight to conquer their portion of space. Is their total absence of cynicism that transforms a cold photography studio into the Moon bringing the show on the edge of an illusion and an actual interstellar journey.

Taking from Mercury 13, the falling NASA project to send thirteen women in outer space back in the 50’s, the show rotates around the emotional consequences of not being recognised for what you are supposed to do. Fluctuating in this unfeasibility, the show becomes an analogical tool putting into dialogue two aspiring astronauts with James Bond, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Tula Cossey, who is the first trans to be published on Playboy.

By staging Project Mercury, OHT carries on her Preformance Series inspired by Richard Sennett’s sociological research on people’s emotions linked to their work condition. It is an on-going archive of performances, a catalogue of the embarrassments of daily life that becomes theatrical matter by making a distinctive use of irony and wit.

The first performance (title: Self-portrait with two friends) tackles failure in a private space. The -sec ond performance (title: Weaknesses) turns on exposing weak side of ours in a public space. Eventually, the third one (title: Project Mercury) rotates around the absence of recognition in outer space.

Production History: Centrale Fies Art Work Space, Teatro Cantiere Florida Florence, Festival Castel dei Mondi Andria, Wonderland Festival

Video: https://vimeo.com/227605307

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.oht.tn.it

https://www.facebook.com/oht.theatre Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 110 111 Photo: Opera del Espacio (Los Angeles, USA)

Opera del Espacio is a collective of performing artists and designers focused on site-specific work in order to reveal new possibilities in public spaces by physically responding to the environment. Informed by Mary Overlie’s Viewpoints, we begin with the architectural definitions of the space and then incorporate the symbolic, associative and emotional responses to the space. Purposely brought to the community to create a live, interactive and re-envisioned experience, our goal has been to challenge audiences to reevaluate the way they view the world around them. Over time, we have expanded to creating new interdisciplinary site-generated performances. And, although the work is created out of the postmodern aesthetics of deconstructionism and minimalism, it is intended for the audience to be accessible, interesting, entertaining and often, interactive. New works and performances include: I’ve Fallen/Clap Off! at Highways Performance Space; The Way Of Water by Caridad Svich at Cal State LA, Bootleg Theatre, Cal Poly Pomona, Hollywood Fringe and South Coast Rep’s SCRamble; Meet Me @ Metro II and III ; Space: The Final Frontier presented at SOSE as part of the Company Creation Festival; Private in Public for the SoCal Dance Invitational Concert and the World Dance Alliance-Americas in Honolulu; Triple [Inter]sect at Highways Performance Space; multiple site-specific performances at the desert ruins at Llano del Rio, Downtown Art Walk, Brewery Art Walk, Echo Park Art Walk, The Series at the Standard and more.

Disciplines: Site-Specific, Performance, Theatre, Dance, Multimedia Space: The Final Frontier

Through movement, projections and an assemblage of the highly theatrical reflections of architects Frank Lloyd Wright, Jul Bachmann, Stanislaus von Moos, and Steen Eiler Rasmussen, space is confronted: from the immense and overwhelming to the tiny and claustrophobic, architecture and space make us feel and behave in some very strange ways. Theatre/Dance/Multimedia. Running Time: 45 minutes. 5 Performers.

Production History: Premiered at the Company Creation Festival, Son of Semele Theatre, Los Ange- les (USA), Jan-Mar 2013.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=3rZ0rPCm7nQ

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.operadelespacio.org

@operadelespacio https://www.facebook.com/operadelespacio Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 112 113 Photo: Wei Zhao Orlando Cela (Arlington, United States)

Venezuelan-born musician Orlando Cela is committed to engaging audiences with lively performances that open new worlds of experience. Known for his engaging performances using imaginative programming, Orlando has premiering over 200 works, both as a flutist and as a conductor. In concert, Mr. Cela regularly offers short lively introductions to selected works, offering audiences entry points into unfamiliar works, so that listeners can easily connect the music with other life experience. Or- lando recently won The American Prize in Conducting, in Orchestral Programming, and second place in the Ernst Bacon Memorial Award for the performance of American music

Disciplines: Conducting, Flute, Performing, Improvising

Meguri

“Meguri” is not just a regular concert, but a live music documentary about composers today and how their work has been influenced by their travels from and to Asia. “Meguri,” translated as “Itinerant,” means to go somewhere and then return, and was inspired by Toru Takemitsu’s piece with the same title, written to the memory of Japanese-American architect Isamu Noguchi.

Through “Meguri,” audiences are introduced to new music through the use of real-time video. Works by composers of Chinese, Indian, Japanese, American, and other origins are performed while simultaneously, in the background, movies are shown presenting paintings, poetry, the inspiration behind the work, or other media which the composers themselves have provided. In between the works, interviews with the composers are played to offer the audience a chance to see and hear the creator of the piece, and to hear, from the composers themselves, facts about their origin, their influences, and their views.

Meguri hopes to be a bridge between contemporary music and the audience, a direct link between creation and creator, and a glimpse into how a shrinking world affects our cultures

Production History: Boston, MA

Video: https://youtu.be/nP-5eiJDMsM

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.orlandocela.com

@flautazOCS https://www.facebook.com/orlandocela Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 114 115 Photo: Marc J Chalifoux Pam Tzeng (Calgary, Canada)

Pam Tzeng is a Calgary based choreographer, performer and teacher. A biologist turned dance artist, Tzeng’s journey has taken her to train, create and perform across Canada, Europe, Taiwan, the United States and Brazil.

Tzeng’s interests lie in both solo performance and experimental collaborative / cooperative projects. Her creations span the world of dance theatre and installation performance, express her interest in the negotiation between cultural borders, social identities and embodied realities within the Canadian mosaic. Her work has been presented in diverse contexts across Canada and in the United States: Springboard Performance Fluid Festival, DSW Alberta Dance Festival, MZD Coming of Age Salon, SubArctic Experimental Improv Series and The Expanse Festival, Vancouver Dancing on the Edge, Toronto Love-In ps. We Are All Here, Guelph Dance Festival and Kinetic Studio Halifax and Risk/ Reward Festival of New Performance Portland. She has been awarded residencies through Dancers’ Studio West, Decidedly Jazz Danceworks, Mile Zero Dance, Interrarium and W&M Dance Projects.

Tzeng is the co-curator and producer of the experimental performance series to the AWE (Calgary). As a performer, she collaborates with independent choreographers and performing arts companies, those including: Tania Alvarado, Denise Clarke/One Yellow Rabbit, Amelia Ehrhardt, Noam Gagnon, Helen Husak, Nicole Mion, Gerry Morita, Robin Poitras, Kenji Takagi, Stephen Thompson, W&M Physical Theatre and Making Treaty 7.

Disciplines: Dance, Theatre, Mask, Clown, Puppetry

“A Meditation on the End” by Jo-Lee

With death in arms, then at her feet, Jo-Lee muses on what has given her life meaning. In this bare bones duet, Tzeng leaps into the fragmented memories of an imagined other, crafting a theatrical dance thatembraces the poetry and humour of existential longing.

Production History: Risk/Reward Festival of New Performance (Portland, Oregon, USA) and The Expanse Festival, part of the Chinook Series (Edmonton, Canada)

Video: Trailer - https://vimeo.com/203052130 | Full - https://vimeo.com/206749967 (password: Jolee)

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.pamtzeng.com/

@pamtzeng https://www.facebook.com/pamtzeng Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 116 117 Photo: PartSuspended PartSuspended - Hari Marini (London, UK)

PartSuspended is the brainchild of Hari Marini, a performance maker and researcher living in London and Athens. Hari founded PartSuspended in 2006 as a dynamic platform on which to foster a wide variety of performances and collaborations with other artists.

The group creates performances starting from personal experiences, everyday life, social space and architecture. Every space is potentially a performance space. We draw on contemporary life for our material: questions, pleasure, anger, fractures, contradictions; we explore these with the audience.

Our process is open to participants in a variety of forms. We have performed in theatre spaces and galleries but also in tents, on staircases, trains, underground spaces and pavements.

Our performances look for fragments, chance, intuition, randomness, facts and poetry; for words that have been unsaid, bodily expressions that have remained undisclosed, communication that is yet to be achieved.

Disciplines: Performance, Devised, Video, Art, Theatre, Installation

Spirals

Spirals is a series of performances, video work, contemporary poetry by female poets, installations and photography.

A poetic journey performed by women, who create and walk in spirals, leaving behind traces of care, joy, pain, friendship, womanhood, evolution, decay, dreams, betrayal, frustration, time and love.

Folding inwards to an undefinable centre.

Unfolding outwards to an endless horizon.

Spiralling and waxing. Spiralling and waning.

Spiralling and resolving.

Spiralling and transforming.

Spirals: Eternity (June 2013) / Spirals: Genesis (May 2017) / Spirals: Galaxies of Women (Jan 2017) / Our video work Spirals: Genesis has been published in the Catalan journal of poetry, Revista Kokoro (October 2017). Spirals: Tracks for Finding Home (Feb 2018) http://www.revistakokoro.com/spirals. html

Production History: We have presented Spirals to Catalan Literature in English: An International Conference, Centre for Catalan Studies, Queen Mary University of London, FADS, September 2017 / Peopling the Palace(s) Festival, Queen Mary University of London, June 2017 / Solidarity NOT Charity curated by The Purple Ladies, March 2017 / FLOW Spiral curated by The Saturday Mu- seum, March 2017

Video: https://www.youtube.com/user/PartSuspendedGroup Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.partsuspended.com/ https://twitter.com/partsuspended https://www.facebook.com/PartSuspended/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 118 119 Photo: Nina Yiu Lai Lei Patrick S. Ford (Hong Kong, PRC.)

Patrick S. Ford was born in the UK but has been living and working in Hong Kong since 1993. He gained his initial training at Leeds University of Arts (UK), BA (Hons) Fine Art at Northumbria Uni- versity (UK) and MFA at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia). He currently works as lecturer at the Hong Kong Design Institute. He helped establish and was founding Course Leader of the BA (Hons) Fine Art programme (run in collaboration between the Hong Kong Voca- tional Training Council and Birmingham City University, UK).

He has lectured on many subjects, has conducted workshops on printmaking and drawing in Hong Kong and Japan (Kyoto Saga University of Arts) and has held artist-in-residence positions in Hong Kong and China (Guanlan Original Printmaking Base).

Patrick, who has worked in a variety of media including Sculpture, Printmaking (previous Chairman of the Hong Kong Graphics Society), Drawing and more recently Performance Art, has participated in over 100 exhibitions in Europe, Asia, North America and Australasia and has work included in many public and private collections.

Disciplines: Performance, Drawing, Sculpture, Printmaking

‘No holiday’

In this performance, entitled ‘No Holiday’, Ford continues his practice of deconstructing everyday life for paradigms that can be isolated and examined within a durational event that attempts to retrace an action or an activity observed in life, exploring and reconfiguring observed movements he calls ‘found actions’. For many working people the highlight of the year is the annual summer holiday. During this short, intense period people remove themselves from their habitual surroundings and immerse themselves enthusiastically into what is often unfamiliar geographical and/or cultural territory. ‘No holiday’ deals with the journey to and from this holiday adventure, reversing the usual paradigm by focusing on the journey rather than the destination and eliminating the relief felt upon arrival at the intended holiday location. Ford will take his suitcase, map and selfie stick everywhere with him as he explores the choreography of the holiday experience in unfamiliar surroundings.

Production History: Duration & Dialogue II Performance Art Festival 2017, Toronto, Canada; Inverse Performance Art Festival 2017, Northwest Arkansas, USA.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCblXHEcuFvMw91ccpFybvcg/videos?view_ as=subscriber

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.patricksford.com

@ps_ford https://www.facebook.com/patrick.s.ford Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 120 121 Photo: Sean Johnson Pepper Pepper (Portland Oregon, USA)

Pepper Pepper is the fabulous drag emcee personality of performance-artist Kaj-anne Pepper, together they make dance, durational performance-art, theatre, cabaret, and video art that turns tragic into magic and trauma into drama.

Pepper as “The Queen” is a loving, loud yet insightful emcee and personality who is preoccupied with glamour-as-witchcraft and entertainment-as-ritual. Kaj-anne is a choreographer and performer who wants to make work about grief, transformation and the practice of presence in the modern world. Together they practice vulnerability, artifice and aesthetics with live audiences and video art.

Disciplines: Drag, Performance Art, Video, Theatre, Dance, Interdisciplinary

Diva Practice (Solo)

Diva Practice (Solo) is a performance about drag queens dancing with uncertainty, because being fabulous takes...practice! Diva (Solo) is an interactive video and media driven contemporary dance show that weaves ritualistic affirmations and impulsive vocality with classic and remixed “DIVA” drag numbers. Barbara Streisand, Judy Garland, Patti LuPone and others are cut-up, remixed and reworked into a series of “live music videos” projected as interactive moments throughout the show. The soloist bridges each number with a ritualistic practice of repeating YES through a series of demanding, dramatic and comedic scenes. The show is a journey through the contemplative pathos, comedy and hysteria of drag diva worship and face melting visuals. Expect sparkling sequins, surreal audio visual interactivity and projection and high energy drag/dance moments.

Production History: Risk/Reward Festival, Portland, OR. The Headwaters Theatre, Portland, OR.

Video: https://vimeo.com/240731413

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://ThePepperPepper.com

@ThePepperPepper https://www.facebook.com/ThePepperPepper Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 122 123 Photo: Top, Saman Shariati. Bottom, Ash Tanasiychuk. Praba Pilar (Dystopia, USA)

Praba Pilar is a diasporic Colombian artist keen on disrupting the contemporary ‘Cult of the Techno- Logic.’ She creates live art, performances, digital and electronic installations, participatory workshops, and experimental public talks. Her projects have traveled widely in all kinds of spaces around the world, and include Enigma Symbiotica, BOT I, the Church of Nano Bio Info Cogno, the Cyborg Soap Opera, and the Nano Sutra of Mathturbation. Aside from her solo practice, she is presently working with Anuj Vaidya in their emergence as Larval Rock Stars (date of origin unknown), and was co-founder of Los Cybrids: La Raza Technocritica (2000) and of the Hexterminators: Super Heroes of the Biozoid Age (1998). She is presently Co-Director of both the Hindsight Institute and Disinter- pellation Technologies. Pilar often writes and co-writes, most recently for the journals Performance, Religion, and Spirituality, Scholar & Feminist Online, and the Lateral Journal of the Cultural Studies Association. She is sometimes written about, most recently in the books Multispecies Salon, edited by Eben Kirksey, Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production, by Claire Taylor and Thea Pitman, and Body As Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender, by Janell Hobson. After extensive and erstwhile lives in Colombia, Mexico, Canada, India, Spain, and Greece, she is presently in residence in Dystopia, United States. She has a PhD in Performance Studies.

Disciplines: Live Art, Disruptive Poesis, Infectious Refusal, New Media, Interactive Interventions

The NO!!!BOT

The NO!!!BOT is a performance project visiting the unnerving world of Exoskeletons to glitch the corrupted code of the Cult of the Techno-Logic. Across our globe, medical, corporate and military sectors are developing Exoskeletons at a very rapid rate. Some of these, such as the medical ones, help folks with immobilizing conditions regain mobility. More often, Exoskeletons are being created for much more perverse aims. Corporations make them so they can double or triple the labor of the workers they cannot replace with robotics. But State militaries? Theirs massively increase the strength of their soldiers, significantly reduce strain in covering long distances, improve precision in shooting, and technologically enhance the capacity for human bodies to more efficaciously kill other human bodies. Silicon Valley technology companies are only too happy to collaborate on fashioning this stale science fiction reality for our shared present.

Praba Pilar presents her own Exoskeleton in this performance. Not an acquiescent programmed Robot or a despicable malicious Bot, the NO!!!BOT is an Exoskeleton created out of the impossible desire of a body resisting the supersonic technological rail driving us deeper into militarized neo-colonial relations. This performance is part of a series of experiments hurtling into our own collective imaginaries, hacking these destructive code makers, and generating our own deviant electric dreams.

Production History: LIVE Biennale 2017, Vancouver, Canada. National Queer Arts Festival 2017, San Francisco, USA.

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://prabapilar.com/

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 124 125 Photo: Luiza Palhares Priscila Rezende (Belo Horizonte, Brasil)

The insertion and presence of the black people in brazilian society act as main drivers and questions raised in the working Priscila Rezende.

Starting from her own experiences, Priscila triggers the limitations imposed, discrimination and stereotypes which is submitted as a black woman and confronts them in visceral bodily actions seeking to establish with the public a direct dialogue, without allowing the possibility of subterfuges or evasions.

Disciplines: Performance, Dance

COME... TO BE UNHAPPY, 2017

In “Come ... to be unhappy” the black body is exposed in extreme form to the reproduction of the stereotyped representation of its image. This body is remembered annually in a hypersexualized way as a symbol of Carnival, in the work of performance, explores and expounds in words the contradictory and distorted appreciation of this body.

With several different words in her body that refers to this stereotyping objectification of this body and using a mask of Flanders, object commonly used in the colonial period for torture of enslaved people, to the sound of the traditional sambas schools of the carnival of Rio de Janeiro, the artist samba uninterruptedly until exhaustion.

In the work the artist dances throught the public but not interecting with them. The public place in this work is of the observation, reflection and in most cases, discomfort.

Production History: Perfura Ateliê de Performance, Sesc Palladium, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Mostra Performatus #2, Sesc Santos, Santos, Brazil. Segunda Preta, Teatro Espanca!, Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

Contact: [email protected]

Website: priscilarezendeart.com

https://www.facebook.com/art.priscilarezende Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 126 127 Photo: Maciej Zakrzewski for Art Stations Foundation by Gra≈ºyna Kulczyk Przemek Kamiński (Berlin, Germany)

Polish performer and choreographer, based in Berlin. He creates and presents his works in the context of both performing and visual arts, focusing on an expanded field of choreography, that manifests itself in a multitude of formats and media. His works range from stage pieces and durational performances in non-theatrical spaces, to installations, videos, lecture performances or drawings. Hence, he investigates, how do they come into contact and resonate with the spectator, how are they encountered, what experiences do they produce, or how a documentation of an ephemeral situation can simply trigger the imagination.

He is interested in working with already existing and circulating forms, using strategies of appropriation, remix and remediation, as well as an in-depth movement research in the process of embodiment. His works often function as associative sites of interconnected or re-/de-contextualized elements, where the movement is perceived from the somatic perspective.

His recent works were presented, among others in the Center for Center for Contemporary Art Ujaz- dowski Castle in Warsaw, Museum of Art in ≈Åód≈∫, Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, Nowy Teatr in Warsaw, Art Stations Foundation in Poznań, Kunsthalle Zurich, Uferstudios in Berlin, during Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space or Malta Festival in Poznań.

He completed his choreographic studies at the HZT Inter-University Center for Dance in Berlin.

Disciplines: Choreography, Dance, Performance, Installation

Pharmakon (it radiates)

Blue screen is a post-production technique that allows image manipulation. By using an even, blue background, the camera-recorded action can be transferred to a completely different scenery. In his latest performance, Przemek Kamiński refers to the cultural history of the colour blue, approaching it through the prism of the ancient Greek term pharmakon, meaning medicine, poison, and something that must be sacrificed. The artist creates a series of vertical landscapes, in which a body irradiated by the colour moves between the visible and the imagined. The first and second plan, as well as viewers’ fantasies, blend into each other, while the identity is negotiated along and across the surface of the screen.

Production History: Art Stations Foundation by Gra≈ºyna Kulczyk in the frame of Solo Project Plus 2017

Video: https://vimeo.com/235706639

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://przemekkaminski.com

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 128 129 Photo: Louis Stein Rachel Karp (New York City, USA)

Rachel Karp is a theater artist who creates rigorously-researched performances that educate, entertain, and encourage action. With an interest in progressive policy, particularly in support of women’s health and rights, Rachel interrogates systemic, legislation-enforced problems and uses found texts, characters, and structures to create original political work.

She has developed and directed original work through Mabou Mines, Ars Nova, Incubator Arts Project, Actors Theatre of Louisville, IRT Theater, Women Center Stage, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, and SPACE on Ryder Farm. Trained as a director, she has also developed and directed works penned by others at Actors Theatre of Louisville, The Flea Theater, Powerhouse Theater Festival, the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival, and Columbia University’s graduate and undergraduate schools. Rachel has associate and assistant directed productions by some of the top theater directors and ensembles working today, including Young Jean Lee, Aaron Landsman, Les Waters, Lila Neuge- bauer, The Mad Ones, Woodshed Collective, PearlDamour, and Big Art Group.

Rachel is a member of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, a former Resident Artist at Mabou Mines, a former Resident Director at The Flea, and a former Directing Intern at Actors Theatre of Louisville. BA, Columbia University; MFA, Carnegie Mellon University (expected 2019).

Disciplines: Theater, Activism, Participation

How to Put On a Sock

“How to Put On a Sock” is an interactive sex ed tour of the United States. Using actual sex ed curricula, “How to Put On a Sock” takes the form of a ninth-grade sex ed lesson that jumps to different states to show the range of what teens are--and are not--being taught in the U.S. today. Leading the lesson is a well-meaning teacher whose own opinions about sex ed are confined by the curricula he’s required to teach. Assisting with the lessons are two ninth-grade students with an increasingly sexual interest in each other and who would greatly benefit from inclusive, comprehensive sexuality education--if only they could get it. The audience is “cast” as their ninth-grade classmates, and they contribute to the lessons through anonymous, text-in polling, answering questions about their experience with sex ed, their comfort discussing sex, and their familiarity with instances of teen STI, pregnancy, and abortion. The United States has the highest teen pregnancy and STI contraction rates in the industrialized world, with nearly 1,700 female-bodied American teens getting pregnant every single day. “How to Put On a Sock” explores the laws and lessons that contribute to those statistics, and the teens who comprise them.

Production History: Carnegie Mellon University

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.rachelkarp.com

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 130 131 Photo: Siobhan Mullan Rainer Pagel (Belfast, UK- Northern Ireland)

My art comments on belief systems, political developments, societal events, absurd ideas and conventions of communication and human interaction. Performance allows me to use process to illustrate how the world in which we live changes while we’re not looking, and how we then misinterpret what we have not seen but assume we know intimately and hold true without any doubt.

The key themes of my performances are linked to my interest in people’s assumptions, perceptions and beliefs as certain unassailable truths, without being aware that all truths are relative and constructs of our individual minds and the environment in which we grew up (physically, intellectually and emotionally). My performances also relate to disbelief, matters we don’t want to see, experience or believe, but have suffered or will have to endure in future.

My performances unashamedly tell stories without becoming theatre, or merely illustrating literature. I use my visual vocabulary to set the context for my “stories” and my references range from the cultural, historic, political and at times highly personal meanings of my actions to the obvious and banal.

My early work related to the dichotomy of living in an unstable society whilst trying or even pretending to live a “normal” life, which was supposedly being upheld and guaranteed by what was euphemistically and non-ag- gressively titled “The Security Forces”. These days, I have progressed to criticising and poking fun at this society’s unbelievably screwed-up value systems.

Disciplines: Performance Art, Live Art “GREEN – Improving the perfect and other superfluous acts”

My performance as part of AccionMad 2016 in Madrid saw me gilding a lily, plastic cutlery and crockery, an egg carton and six eggs and the legs of my bar stool. I had a back projection film behind the space I used for my action of a gilded lily, which gradually returned to green and finally withered, while I was starting with a green lily, gradually gilding it during the performance. As my bar stool had a wobble, I sawed bits off the four legs, which in the end left the stool still wobbly, but at a usable height. At the end of the performance, I tried to reinstate the original height of the stool by taping with green duct tape the cut-offs back to the bar stool, rendering it visually similar to what it was at the beginning of the performance, but not usable as a stool.

I am fascinated about today’s tendency - especially in the political scene in the country where I live - to take a perfectly well working situation, dismantle and destroy it and then put it back together badly but gild it over with the claim that it is now so much of a better solution to our (social) problems. (I am writing this as a foreign citizen living in the UK in the times of total uncertainty of the Brexit negotiations with the EU)

I do think the audience in Madrid got my point :-).

Production History: 2006 - “Exchange Places” - Canadian and Northern Ireland Artists, Black Box, Belfast 2007 - “Fix” Performance Festival, Catalyst, Belfast 2008 - “Archive”, Catalyst, Belfast (Solo) 2008 - “I am – Jestem” - Polish and Northern Ireland Artists, Black Box, Belfast 2009 - “New Moves” – Contemporary arts Fes- tival, Glasgow 2009 - “Open 10” – International Performance Festival, Beijing, China 2009 - Commemorating 160 years of Belfast Art College – University of Ulster, Belfast 2010 - “Infr’Action”, International Performance Art Festival, Sete, France 2010 - Enniskillen Arts Festival, Enniskillen 2010 - “Tulca” Arts festival, Galway 2010 - “An hour on a Sunday”, PS2 Gallery, Belfast 2011 - “Infr’Action Venice”, International Performance Art event, Venice, Italy 2011 - “Guangzhou Live”, International Arts Festival, Guangzhou, China 2012 - “The Decade of Anniversaries”, University of Ulster, Belfast 2012 - “Sweden Live”, International Arts Festival, Gothenburg, Swe- den 2013 - “Deframed”, 2nd Infr’Action Venice, International Performance Art event, Venice, Italy 2014 - “Die Axt im Haus…”, Bbeyond Bel-Mad exchange, Belfast 2015 - “Labels” , 3rd Infr’Action Venice, International Performance Art event, Venice, Italy 2016 - “GREEN – Improving the perfect and other superfluous acts” - Ac- cionMad, Madrid, Spain 2017 - “Hommage a JB in gold” - 4th Infraction Venice

Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.rainerpagel.eu

https://www.facebook.com/rainer.belfast Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 132 133 Photo: Rareş Augustin Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin Crăiuţ (Brussels, Belgium)

I am a Romanian Brussels based artist-researcher developing food performances employing affect, memory, collaboration and factual information. As a professionally trained chef and also a graduate of a performance research program I am convinced and try to convince through my work that by investigating past meals and edible contexts can help us understand issues of sustainability today. Performance pieces like AlimenTara, The Comfort Food Cooking Continuum, the Transitions or The Cucina Povera Cookbook, all deal with the transitory and sensorial in both food and memory, the ob- stacles and difficulties in question being food and memory in their peculiar conjunction of arts-based research.

Disciplines: Performance, Food, Memoir

AlimenTara

AlimenTara is a performance art piece investigating food from 1980 to 1989 in Romania, a decade marked by a nationwide program for ``scientific nutrition``. Through speculative cooking and narration the audience participates to the common and the uncommon in Romanian communist food culture: food shortages, adaptive cooking, staple food rationing, nationally owned food shop systems, hoarding and hunger, humour and fear. The piece is part of a larger artistic research project investigating food as an artistic medium. Ever since its initial premiere in 2014, by re-performing AlimenTara, in whole or in part I have observed and identified intersections between memory and food, always following the belief that in performance art one should never do something that oneself could not be moved or changed by. With each re-enactment the work developed and combined artistic practices and tools of knowledge production investigating food in 1980s Romania. AlimenTara has focused on researching communist food through: staging autobiographical and episodic memories, initially, and moved on to incorporate semi-structured interviews, historic food reconstruction of dishes, exhibit- ing food, developing food art installation pieces, re-enacting fragments of food performance art pieces from the 1980s, audience feeding devices etc. The performance combines these research tools and the knowledge they bring about food as a historical witness in a place, where food eating as performance re-enactment is supported by recipes and memoir protocols.

Production History: a.pass, Brussels

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.performingfood.com

@PerformingFood https://www.facebook.com/performingfood/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 134 135 Photo: Micha Hahn Riccardo Matlakas (London, UK)

MATLAKAS is a multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary artist working with several media, with performance and painting as main focus. Matlakas has worked internationally adopting an anthropo- logical approach to his work which examines the current state we are as human species, observing the paradoxical way we behave as humans.

In an interview with London based Psychiatrist Lauren Gavaghan, Matlakas says:

My work arises explores the realm of human consciousness and the discovering of its unfolding quality.

I have a sculpture background but I mainly work with performance and painting and with both I explore the true potential of human being and reveal the hidden yet undiscovered sides of our potential.

My work witnesses a phenomenological approach therefor it often appears after long research and deep inquiries.

Concerns in my work include spiritual growth and how human being can develop further as a species living on earth, including the cycle of birth and death, I show the positive side of being, collectively and alongside tuned to individual understanding of the world.

My performance and painting are responsive about the human condition in different cultural e geographical contexts. My work attempts to explore answers and solutions to our way of behaving in the world as responsible creatures.

I am trained also in Reiki, Hypnosis, dance, Martial Arts, Meditation and extreme sports, which are all tools that taught me to go with the flow.

Disciplines: Performance, Dance, Painting, Installation, Video, Interview Melting Borders

I created “Melting Borders” during a residency in Armenia, I had a strong need to make visible the beauty of culture, rather then its patriotic and competitive quality, I wanted to highlight the fact that we are all the same and that culture it’s just a spice added to each nation and that borders and boundaries are only a human invention. My intention with this action is to highlight the beauty of culture and how nevertheless the difficulties Armenian culture remained very strong, so what remains of a flag is simply the real essence of culture, the sweetness of it. Flag belongs to politics and the real importance belongs to traditions and culture what people share and not what people struggle or fight for.

With this action I wanted to symbolically melt the borders away, leaving only the sweetness and the beauty of humanity, in this particular case, Armenian culture.

The shirt is what remains of the action which I intend to repeat in other countries.

Production History: Streets of Yerevan (Public Performance) Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnGXDG1YpIw Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.matlakas.co.uk

@ARTMATLAKAS https://www.facebook.com/matlakas Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 136 137 Photo: Omar Willey Sachie Mikawa (Los Angeles, USA)

Japanese artist Sachie Mikawa’s music-driven theatrical world combines classical music, jazz, circus and physical comedy which The Scotsman has described as “Idiosyncratic Genius.” As a theatre maker, composer and musician, Sachie often collaborates with artists in US, Australia and Argentina. Sachie has recently created a full-length multimedia one-woman show, Fish Saw, which has premiered in Buenos Aires, Seattle, London (ON) and Ottawa. Argentine-based director George Lewis is her frequent collaborator and he co-wrote and directed Fish Saw. Sachie is the resident composer and performer of Downunderground Production based in Surfers Paradise, Australia. Sachie has appeared in numerous festivals and performance venues around the world including Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Tasmanian Circus Festival, Ferrara Music Festival in Italy and the Canadian Fringe Festival Circuit.

Sachie’s work extends to film as well. Most recently she composed for short film “Coffeehead,” -com missioned by Wide Angle Tasmania, as well as “The Birdmann LIVE,” a live recording of a full-length theatrical production.

Disciplines: Theatre, Music, Interdisciplinary, Multimedia, Visual, Circus

Fish Saw

“IDIOSYNCRATIC GENIUS” - THE SCOTSMAN

Through the eyes of a talking fish, a magical encounter of two girls across time and oceans tells the story of an eccentric family and their house by the sea. Miyazaki meets Garcia Marquez in this one- woman multimedia theatrical production featuring original animation and musical score.

In 2011, Japan had its largest earthquake and subsequent tsunami. The closest city to the epicenter was Sendai, Sachie’s hometown. When Sachie first got news of the tsunami, her first thought was she had lost her mother. In fact it was three days later Sachie learned her mother was alive.

“Mom moved to US to live with me after losing everything. She had just lost so people but the death of a four-year-old girl, who was her cousin’s daughter, affected her the most. She was going through the survivor’s guilt and it was very hard to watch. Around that time an image appeared where the dead girl and Mom as a very young person were meeting underwater. I was trying to ease Mom’s pain even if it was only in my imagination. Fish Saw started from there.”

Fish Saw is about Sachie’s mother, who is the The Little Girl With Glasses, and astounding true stories of her family and the fate of their house in the face of an incredible natural disaster.

“Beautiful, funny, tragic and touching show about the endurance of memory in the face of human mortality.” -apt613

“Heartbreakingly beautiful” -Audience member

Production History: Espacio Transparente (Buenos Aires, Argentina), McManus Stage at Grand The- atre (London, Canada), La Nouvelle Scene (Ottawa, Canada), Theatre Off Jackson (Seattle, USA)

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1t3FJtCuOA Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.fishsaw.com

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 138 139 Photo: Silvia Grav Samantha Shay / Source Material (Reykjavik, Iceland)

Samantha Shay is a young American director of theatre and film, performer, and producer. She creates multi sensorial poetic landscapes, reminiscent of a living dream. Her work is at it’s best, a collaboration between the body and its senses, performing on the body like a welcomed hallucination. She is the founder of internationally recognised artist collective Source Material, and frequently collaborates with musicians to make films, including K Á R Y Y N, JFDR (Jófríður Akadóttir), Jodie Landau, and Sóley (Sóley Stefánsdóttir). 2016 marked an initiatory time in her young career. In July she premiered her performance of Light, which garnered the attention of world renowned artists such as performance artist Marina Abramovic, who mentored Shay through the creation of the work, and Björk, who listed her as one of her artistic inspirations in The Guardian after attending the premier. She then headed to Poland to premier A Thousand Tongues in the world renowned Theatre Olympics as part of the European Capital of Culture 2016, a co-production between Source Material, and the Grotowski Institute. For more information, visit samantha-shay.com and sourcematerialcollective.com.

Disciplines: Theatre, Music, Dance, Interdisciplinary of Light

OF LIGHT is an opera, a durational performance, an incantation of celestial rhythm. OF LIGHT explores light and dark as a gateway of personal initiation. Performed almost completely in darkness, OF LIGHT envelops the audience in music from modern original pieces to pre-Christian incantations, exploring how human beings, through their ability to resonate and create sound, are light bearers.

Having only been performed for one evening, OF LIGHT has received global acclaim as well as praise from artists such as Marina Abramovičá, who mentored the project, and Björk, who named the leaders of the project, Samantha Shay (Director), and KÁ RYYN (Composer) as groundbreaking artists in The Guardian. Additionally, the only released composition from the performance was named Best New Track on Pitchfork in August 2017.

Production History: Tjarnarbio in Reykjavik, Iceland

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_2kRefJazA

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.sourcematerialcollective.com

https://www.facebook.com/sourcematerialus/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 140 141 Photo: Mette Thea Jacobsen Sandro Masai (Aalborg, Denmark)

Brazilian Performance Artist and Researcher, Multimedia Artist and Interaction Designer.

Sandro Masai has been living in Denmark since 2007. He holds a Bachelor degree of ‘Art and Tech- nology’ from Aalborg University and a Master degree of ‘Interaction Design’ from Kolding School of Design. He works with interactive artworks and theatrical performances. He often combines different art forms. He has worked in collaboration with several international artists in many countries, such as Brazil, England, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Sweden and Denmark.

His performances include acting in films, theatre plays, modern dance, butoh dance and performance art.

Sandro Masai is also engaged in practice-based academic research..

Disciplines: Performance, Installation, Practice-based, Research, Empathy, Design

NINA - Young, Gifted and Black

“NINA - Young, Gifted and Black” is a butoh dance performance created and performed by Sandro Masai. It is also a hommage to Nina Simone. This performance was inspired by two other performances, 1) “La Argentina Sho” [Admiring La Ar- gentina], Kazuo Ohno’s world famous butoh performance directed by Tatsumi Hijikata and dedicated to the great Spanish dancer Antonia Mercé; and 2) “IKIRU – Hommage à Pina Bausch” created and performed by Tadashi Endo.

Duration: 30 minutes.

Production History: Aalborg Surreal Festival 2016 (DK), Copenhagen Jazz Festival 2017 (DK), Butoh Centrum MAMU 2017 (GE)

Contact: [email protected]

Website: https://sandromasai.wordpress.com

@sandromasai https://www.facebook.com/sandromasaiartist/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 142 143 Photo: Uupi Tirronen Sanna Kekäläinen (Helsinki, Finland)

As a woman I’m taking a stand on the world. It is shocking to see the current division into east and west, north and south, rich and poor, A- and B-class citizens.

I have investigated how very private things experienced in the body can be linked to broader contexts. I want to stress the possibility of discovering shared opportunities as opposed to division and isolation.

My great passion is to find out how to instil as much information and thought as possible into movement. I am convinced that movement can be as accurate a tool for communication and expressing the mind as any other form of communication.

I dislike the vocabulary of market economy, which is appearing more and more in the areas of culture and art. I don’t consider myself a provider of services, perhaps more like a servant.

I work because of the fear of the increasing lack of values and the growth of the meaning of money in the world: the commercialism in art, the disappearance of humanism and the increasing of inequality and exploitation.

I see my role as an artist as a role of an observer, provocateur, problem-setter, poet and promoter of female existence.

Disciplines: Contemporary Dance, Performing Arts

Insane

What is insanity? There isn’t an answer.

Can insanity be made into a representation, or be performed? No.

Where is the locus of insanity? In between people.

From these questions begins Sanna Kekäläinen’s new work its journey to the concept of insanity. Im- portant things are never in one individual, but always in between people, metaphorically in between two human beings. Divinity and insanity are in between two human beings.

Insanity is also something new and unprecedented. Three insane inventions: bicycle (1861), guillo- tine (1792), electric shock treatment (1937). Three insane events: Columbus thought he was in India (1492), the Holocaust (1941-45), walking on the Moon (1969).

Poet Gunnar Björling (1887-1960) who is quoted in the work, is the most significant Finnish mod- ernist poet and was considered mad. - Sanna Kekäläinen

Production History: Premiere 24.1.2018 Stoa Culture Centre, Helsinki Video: https://vimeo.com/kekalainenco Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.kekalainencompany.net

@Kekalainen_Co https://www.facebook.com/KekalainenCompany Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 144 145 Photo: Sirje Viise Sirje Aleksandra Viise (Berlin, Germany)

Estonian-American soprano and artist Sirje Aleksandra Viise was educated in Indiana, NYC, Boston and Berlin. She specializes in extended vocal techniques, contemporary music performance, and sculpture. In her solo programs and performances, she questions the character of the female performer and the role of the singer in contemporary society. She frequently collaborates with composers like Vinko Globokar, Simon Steen-Andersen, Alexander Schubert, Jakob Ullmann, Helmut Oehring, Nikolai Worsaæ, Dariusz Przybylski, Timo Kreuser, Stephen Crowe, Erling Wold and Ruth Wiesenfeld and has worked with ensembles and artists such as Ensemble Mosaik and Zafraan Ensemble, Ensemble UnitedBerlin, Figura Ensemble Copenhagen, RISK, Houligé Hobster and the Amazing Fire Ants, S.A.F.T., Romeo Castelucci, and Pina Bausch.

Sirje frequently premieres pieces, tours and performs at, amongst others, the Akademie der Künste Berlin, Figura Festspiele Copenhagen, Gdański Festiwal Muzyczny, Filharmonia Gorzow, MUSICA Festival Strasbourg, Milano MUSICA, klagenfurter ensemble, AFEKT New Music Festival Tallinn, Theater KOSMOS Bregenz, Schaubühne Berlin, Teater Får302 Copenhagen, Théâtre de la Ville de Paris, Latvian National Opera, Estonian National Opera, Sadler’s Wells Theater London, Ultraschall Berlin, MaerzMusik Berlin, Documenta 14 Athens, Harbin Grand Theater China, Tianjin Grand The- ater China, Unerhörte Musik Berlin, Konzerthaus Berlin, Carnegie Hall NYC, HCMF Huddersfield, T&M Paris, ROMAEUROPA, etc. as a soloist and as a member of Solistenensemble PHØNIX16.

Disciplines: Music, Sound, Performance, Composition, Theater, Sculpture Sirje Aleksandra Viise

DOLLS is a solo performance piece for live voice, tape, and live electronics and sculpture taking place in Copenhagen at Teater FÅR302 from December 1 to December 25. Every day brings a unique performance, where all aspects are performed, sung, designed and manipulated by one extremely busy performer at 1:6 scale. With dolls.

DOLLS is a spectacle highlighting the absurdity of grand theatre, opera, ballet, and oratorio at a 1:6 scale and the waning importance of the individual performer and artist in the context of institutional artistic success. It is also a takedown of the strangeness of other social norms, such as gender portrayal and religiosity, in traditional musical theatre forms.

DOLLS is, among other things, a comment on the unreal expectations placed on performers to do too much, and the extraordinary pressure of being expendable and poorly compensated in a business which, often due to funding requirements or expectations, fosters its own obsolescence with a dogmat- ic notion of tradition and value.

DOLLS IS THE FIRST PART OF A SOLO TRILOGY, VOICES FROM THE FACTORY.

In PART TWO of the trilogy (documentation), the musicians involved in part one are summarily fired due to budget cuts, and apply for government assistance.

In PART THREE (sound installation and sculpture), a select few of these artists are given the opportunity to work in the theatre cafe for below minimum wage, under miserable conditions.

Production History: Teater Får302, Copenhagen, DK Video: https://www.youtube.com/user/SirjeViise/videos Contact: [email protected] Website: http://dolls.sirjeviise.com

https://www.facebook.com/sirje.aleksandra Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 146 147 Photo: Jonny Bix Bongers sisu&company (Hamburg, Germany) ssiu&company were a group of performing artist students, which met in 2015, coming together in a free cooperation of four different german universities of performing arts, to work in a kind of improvised dance-theatre-performance lab. Based on similar interests, to try out there differences, experiences and looking for interdisciplinary ways of creative work, they developed a performance and became a vivid freelance company. Until today they are creating collectively together, performing in german theaters and festivals their theatre piece “SISU”, although they haven’t a common located theater or base. sisu&company means to keep the differences of individual expressions, to cut down the borders between disciplines of studied subjects, to work for a common interest and to live a road company.

Disciplines: Performance, Text, Movement, Voice, Light, Conceptual Scenography

SISU

SISU is a finish word, the meaning could stay for inner will and endurance. The actors are running during the performance 1 1/2 hours, stucked in a circled system, which don’t allow to pass each others. They have to hold balance in the patter of the room, to keep the shape and structures they are part of. So, the actors playing on their physically limits to point out the story their characters are into. This four characters are sitting in one car, heading the same goal; although, everybody want to arrive before the others. Trough a radio report in the car the four are listening to a story of two persons. That both persons are sitting for a competition for minutes in a boiling hot sauna. One guy died, his opponent survived marked for life, because he burnt 70% of his skin. Who can sit longer in a too hot sauna? Who is better than the other? For what? What is winning about? Both story layers, the performativ way of using the stage and music input as well, are showing a world full of concurrence and speed. Higher, bigger, smarter, better is the interest and need of every figure. But without the others you can not rival and compete. The audience is sitting around the actors in a circle, together with the performers they are creating the idea of sauna, in the middle 200 white towels. Depending of the size of performing room, it is getting too warm, like in a real sauna sometimes. Wind is blowing into the audiences faces, the actors are running all the time close to their places, so everybody is involved in the same theatrical situation.

Production History: Burgtheater Domäne Hildesheim, Kulturbrauerei Bern, Brutkasten - Gaußstraße Hamburg, Kleiner Saal HfMDK Frankfurt, Theaterschiff Hamburg, UWE Festival München

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OO97GRZrDY

Contact: [email protected]

Website: https://sisuandcompany.jimdo.com

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 148 149 Photo: Radovan Dranga smorenberg/santarciel (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

We are SMORENBERG/SANTARCIEL, a theatre duo based in The Netherlands. Our collaboration started in 2014 at the Academy of Theater and Dance in Amsterdam, where Rob Smorenberg (1993) and Fabián Santarciel la Quintana (1971) met. Since then we have create three performances: rebel (2014), Us (2015), Onbenoembaar; Indefinable (2017).

Our theatre talks about the needs and the limitations of the human being and how we humans deal with it. From this fascination, our process departs from a specific action that is carried out to an extreme in the hope of finding an answer, creating a handhold. It often ends in raw and absurd performances with a strong physical impact, attempting to combine the banal with the poetic, the everyday with the philosophical, and the thinking with the action.

Our work has been so far shown mainly in The Netherlands and in Uruguay within the framework of Project Tráfico (Traffic Project), an initiative by Fabián, trying to strike a cultural bridge between Uruguay and the Neth- erlands, where SMORENBERG/SANTARCIEL plays an important role. And we are excited about the idea to share our work with other audiences, in other countries and continents.

Rob Smorenberg (NL) is in 2017 graduated of the Mime School (Academy of Theater and Dance, Amsterdam).

Fabián Santarciel la Quintana (UY / NL) graduated in 1996 from the Margarita Xirg√∫ Drama School (Montevi- deo, UY) and in 2006 of the Mime School (Academy of Theater and Dance, Amsterdam).

Disciplines: Performance, Phsyical Theatre, Mime Indefinable

We are looking for something in ourselves that remains, something worth to exist.

What do we want to pass on and how do we do that?

In Indefinable we show something of our own; our small stories, our weaknesses and desires.

It started from the common sense of caducity, of transience, the realization that each one of us will stop existing. By relatives who died and watching our lives transform. We came across questions that brought us in action: “What can we do to create something lasting?” “What should not be forgotten about us?” This piece is an attempt to find answers to these questions. It is an absurd and raw self portrait, a provocative fight against the (im)possible attempt to find an essence.

Reaction from an audience member: Indefinable is the title of your performance. What usually remains unapproachable in the Art. The weakness, it’s too personal, the little stories. Or it must have been poured into an aesthetic story. You want to show it in all its nakedness. It gave me pain to not be part of it. It gave me information that I cannot use in life afterwards. It gave me questions that stayed with me without the need to be answered. I thought all the stuff you used, the order and the change of it excellent. The difference between you two, the personal lines that did not crossed. I found it beautiful to see.

Production History: Playtime Festival, Frascati Theater (Amsterdam, The Netherlands). It’s Festival, Brakke Grond Theater (Amsterdam, The Netherlands). Theater aan Zee, Baai+ (Oostende, Belgium).

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.nowebsite.com

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 150 151 Photo: Millena Machado SPECTROLAB (Cuiabá, Brazil)

Raquel Mützenberg investigates performance, puppetry and body. She thinks the scene from a becoming-body that is support and material for the new beings, generating visualities in strangeness by blurring the boundary between body and substances. The artist allows her skin to be affected by the collective subjectivity as an impulse to create from puppetry techniques. In the last three years, Mützenberg has been creating about the female body, with works for gallery, theater and street.

Disciplines: Performance, Puppetry, Female, Body, Foam, Skin

Maiêutica

Maiêutica is a birth of ideas. Ideas that make up a body-flesh that folds and unfolds, updates and condenses the physicalities and the plasticity of beings on the scene. The body is a material and plastic resource that allows itself to be divided or multiplied by female subjectivities.

The Maiêutica process is an attempt to “re-birth” itself. The scenic material was collected from contact with pregnant women, parturients, doulas, news stories and group discussions about humanized childbirth, obstetric violence and misogyny. The investigation began as an academic research and was developed in exchanges with artists from different areas, prevailing interdisciplinary dialogue during its construction.

Production History: Brazil: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, Florianópolis, Curitiba, Vitória, Recife, Teresina, Manaus, Belém, João Pessoa, Belo Horizonte,

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MygCTQF1Xc&t=101s

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.spectrolab.art.br

@flagelos https://www.facebook.com/performancemaieutica Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 152 153 Photo: Visit Genk, Mieke Offermans and Richard Praast Stevarius / Steven Van Nuffelen (Antwerp, Belgium)

Steven is an authentic, open minded, creative and self-sufficient artist. With a mime and theatre background, he winds as if the wind pilots him into the performance. Butoh, meditation, and techniques of NLP and Cranio Sacral Therapy under holds directive and meaningful movement.

He is a sensitive artist who works from the inside. With his lived through performances he ‘attracts’ and ‘touches’ the audience. But he is also a ‘live’ performer, capable of translate the setting and audience instantly to his authentic performance, without losing the overview. Interaction and playing with the moment, the now, is his brand.

His solo concept of over 25 years in Performing Arts and special effects, has developed an equilibrium translated through animation and shows, with a great deal of experience in first hand made to measure projects . Collaboration in different theatrical productions has widen his horizon. Here he picks out interesting standouts, and mingles them into his personal work. This is the place where life and work comes together and can bring projects up to a higher level.

Disciplines: Performingarts, Dance, Theatre, Butoh, Sitespecific, Outdoor

Pilotage

PILOTAGE runs on the flow between water and a body, locked in as one element. The boat, Pilotage, connects these two worlds perfectly as having no choice. It connects to any change that is happening with or between them, but stays just in the middle! This continuous movement becomes a silent float. The gap is opened to all who wants to float along, becoming one with water and one with his or her body. Floating together is a never ending story, what comes, that goes. The voyage is the wellspring of resource that is yours, mine and ours.

The character played is a personalization of what happens in the physical body, not the mind. Where the body starts to move, stories eject or emotions pop up after some time. They can be the captain of things to happen: thoughts, emotions, maybe a refugee boat or the River Styx running down to the “Other side”, connection with oneself and the pause needed to continue life, or the movement in existence taken by the wind, a wind, winding further. The water will take over, as long as one let them to be taken, they will float along.

Soft moments to experience through a Beauty that can’t sink J.

The performance can be played over longer periods of time. Mostly played in slow motion even during interaction. The boat is driven by a long pole or a slow sailing whisper motor. Occasional use of pyro-techniques is possible.

Production History: Vurige Vijvers Genk, De Gavers Geraardsbergen, Vrijbroekpark Mechelen

Video: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCusZAXMPcPtWzBT3AAxQU4g

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.stevarius.com

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 154 155 Photo: Michael Fenlason Strada Company (Tucson, USA)

Comprised of actors, writers, artists, dancers, comedians, artisans, and raconteurs, STRADA COM- PANY’s mission to ACT: Advocate for the arts and artists, Create new art and art’s experiences, and to leverage Technologies to create and promote new art forms.

In its third year, STRADA’s mission is to engage the community with participatory experiences, create expansive outreach to emerging artists, and optimize visitor-centered, arts-led events at a strange variety of places in Tucson and southern Arizona. STRADA actively supports the visual and performing art of local and regional artists, multidisciplinary art strategies and art creation through programs, events, community collaboration and, participation. With a commitment to diversity, new technologies, and innovation, STRADA seeks to expand the role of the arts. We make things, stories, and ideas. Strada is dedicated to working with and for the community, both locally and worldwide.

Mission: The mission of Strada Company is to support parity, innovation, entrepreneurship, and excellence in the visual, media, and performing arts.

Disciplines: Theatre, Art, Music, Film, Comedy, Dance

Nevertheless

In January of 2017, seven women who have monthly met for a book discussion group, find themselves overwhelmed with the results of the U.S. presidential election and the imminent inauguration. Most were against Donald Trump, some were ambivalent, and one very much for his candidacy. Previously, the extent of their friendship had been limited to books and the occasional social gathering. Now, their friendship must be tested by this new charged political environment and the sudden urgency to define themselves as women. This piece was devised and written by Michael Fenlason and features a cast of seven actors including Denise Blum, Kate Cannon, Robin Carson, Veronica Conran, Jamie Hoggan, Callie Hutchison, Mayela Morales, Jasmine Roth, Rachel Santay, Nicole Scott, and Nico- lette Shaffer-Filippi. Nevertheless is physical, verbal, and honest. In a companion piece, Surprise and a Victim features comedian-actor Josh Parra and actor Nicole Scott in a fierce, comic story of the sometimes un-beautiful mind of a person who sees the world as ridicu - lous whether behind the mic or not. Strada Company strives to look at human experience with the same passion and complexity as the experience itself. Creating over twenty-three shows in ten years, Nevertheless and Surprise and a Victim are the newest embodiments of our theatre’s investigation of catharsis through recognition. These productions premiere in 2018.

Production History: Premieres this January in Tucson Arizona at the Cabaret Theatre at the Temple of Music and Art

Video: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUPhEeOmLr2G9cBwq3v88PQ

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.stradacompany.org

@StradaCoAZ https://www.facebook.com/stradaarts Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 156 157 Photo: The Actors Studio Seni Teater Rakyat The Actors Studio Seni Teater Rakyat (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)

In 1995, two individuals created history by building the first privately owned and operated theatre in Malaysia below Dataran Merdeka. The individuals were none other than Faridah Merican and Joe Hasham. The said theatre was the The Actors Studio@Plaza Putra.

Then in 2003, flash floods inundated KL and destroyed The Actors Studio’s underground complex- en tirely. It was out of this tragedy that the The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (klpac) was born.

The arts community needed a new home. And history was made yet again. The Actors Studio, YTL Corporation and Yayasan Budi Penyayang joined hands to establish the country’s first fully-integrated arts centre. klpac, a non-profit organisation, opened its doors in May 2005.

It has not only been a home to the arts community and a foster home for foreign troupes but it has become the very lifeline that keeps the arts and cultural life in Malaysia breathing. An arts and cultural icon. Historical landmark. Award-winning architectural design. There is nothing quite like klpac, really.

Disciplines: Theatre, Physical Theatre

KANDANG

KANDANG explores the limits to which we confine ourselves - intentionally or not – to the cages which shape the structures of our lives.

An allegorical take of the history of Malaysia, KANDANG tells the story of the domesticated farm animals of Ladang Jones, whose lives are woven together to shape a tale reflecting the very fabric of Malaysian society. They manage to overthrow the slave-driving colonialist owner and gain independence. However, the sweet possibilities of liberty and prosperity proves to be an empty promise when they find themselves trapped by their own idealism.

The story of KANDANG tackles the idealism and optimism of a young nation post- independence. KANDANG has tapped into the very heartbeat of Malaysian social and ideological identity with a unique mix of gravitas, humour, and a sprinkling of some cili padi. From the kain sampin used for the costumes, to the usage of Gamelan and Sape in the music; KANDANG’s identity is distinctively Malaysian. KANDANG has tapped into a deep vein of Malaysian national identity, and it draws blood. Like the gong of the gamelan used in the show, the issues of KANDANG resonate long after the gong has been rung. First published in England in 1945, George Orwell’s novella Animal Farm reflects the Russian Revolution in 1917, and the consequential establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. As relevant today as it was in 1945, Animal Farm’s has been given new life in KANDANG, a Bahasa Malaysia adaptation, localised to a Malaysian cultural and socio-economic context.

Production History: The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.klpac.org

@TAS_Malaysia https://www.facebook.com/TheActorsStudio/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 158 159 Photo: Stephanie Fishbein The Ghost Road Company (Los Angeles, USA)

The Ghost Road Company is one of Los Angeles’ premiere theatre ensembles dedicated to the creation of new work for the stage. Our company is unique in its approach, having developed our own methods of collaborative development over the years –methods that utilize the talents and experiences of each ensemble member. These techniques produce plays created by our members with a dedication to our mission:

The ensemble scavenges the current social landscape for objects, language and images that are, in turn, informed by the ensemble’s individual experiences of the world, creating something surprising and unexpected. The world of the piece is the piece itself, in which the “everyday” transforms into unexpected realizations and epiphanies about the nature of truth and possibility in the world at large.

Disciplines: Theatre, Devised, Adapation, Ensemble, Physical, Greek

Asterion

Asterion is a performance by Los Angeles-based Ghost Road Company, one of Los Angeles’s premiere theater ensembles dedicated to the collaborative creation of new work for the stage. Inspired by the myth of the Minotaur, Asterion explores the life of one man who has seen the dark side of his nature and fights to regain his humanity. Returning from a sort of exile, battle weary Asterion faces a strange homecoming full of veiled intentions and twisted familial bonds. In this world of shadows he must face his demons as those closest to him fan the flames of his monstrousness. In this telling of the Minotaur’s story we focus on the man as opposed to the monster and his battle to keep the beast contained within.

Asterion is a visceral and poetic retelling of the Minotaur’s story and inspired by the stories of Ameri- can soldiers returning home from war. The work was conceived by Katharine Noon, artistic director of The Ghost Road Company and developed collaboratively with the company. The piece also reflects the recent work of the ensemble with Teatr ZAR. This collaboration focused on the techniques of polyphonic singing and the creation of new musical elements.

Production History: The Getty Villa (Malibu, CA) and The Grotowski Institute (Wroclaw, Poland)

Video: https://vimeo.com/221327908

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.ghostroad.org

@theghostroad

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 160 161 Photo: Omar Imran The Kaizen M.D. (Singapore, Singapore)

About The Kaizen M.D is performing arts collective that gathers young artists from various art disciplines with the aim of creating multidisciplinary works in Singapore. Founded in July 2012 by its Artistic Director Norisham Osman, The Kaizen M.D. envisions to be the platform for exploration, development and collaboration for young and upcoming multidisciplinary contemporary artists in Singapore while creating new works. Its recent productions include Project Spaceship: The Space in Between in September 2016, The Problem With Being Human in October 2015 and The Path to Revival (as part of Malay Culturefest 2015) in November 2015.

Vision Be the one to fill the void for Singaporean Art-making, the Kaizen way.

Mission • To create original, process-based Singaporean works focusing on the interdisciplinary and the inter- cultural, regardless of art form

• To provide platforms for exploring opportunities, developing artistic capability, and fill a gap in the arts scene.

• To create and maintain meaningful and long-term collaboration with the arts community at large.

Disciplines: Dance, Theatre, Music, Visual Kaizen X Sound Lab

Kaizen X is a collective work that brings four musicians from different background and genre together, to experiment and explore the capability of various instruments, after which blending them into one creation. Four established musicians in their own extreme field of expertise came together with one aim: to create. Human beings are diurnal and cyclical creatures with a desire and need for routine. Unwilling to bend from the orthodox or stray from the conventional to dance to a groove created all on our own, the rhythm we live with flatlines. We’ve asked if there were individual experiences that we could glean from a 24-hour workday that has been continuously broken into systematic periods. In a city where all lives look the same with segments of commute, work, lunch rush and dinner with family and friends to gently assuage our search for connection, are there unique rhythms that pulse? We will tell the story with a rhythm we’ve made through living the experiences of the workaday man. Each musician holds talent with conventional instruments such as Gamelan, Sundanese Kecapi, Guitar, Vocals, Percussion and Synthesizers. These are not instruments that are traditionally played together. But just as different languages and different lifestyles converge to make a nation, vastly different musical characteristics can make a spiritual ambience that it appeals to the audience’s primal urge to be understood. With these lofty ideals aside, we aim as musicians to tell our stories and to give place to our own creative impulses.

Production History: Centre 42

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBJP-j5NH8E&list=PLWSaWt25NCbHQwm1bpWB2cr sINf14NsEF Contact: [email protected] Website: https://kaizenxsoundlab.wixsite.com/kaizenxsoundlab

https://www.facebook.com/TheKaizenMD/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 162 163 Photo: Raymond Haddad The Nerve Tank (New York City, USA)

Named One to Watch in 2010 by BroadwayWorld, The Nerve Tank is a world-class innovator in theatrical performance. Founded by Melanie S. Armer and Chance Muehleck, the company collaborates with actors and designers in a spirit of artistic adventure and remodels traditional performance methods. We combine elements of popular culture, mediated image, and physical presence to test lines of engagement between spectator and live event.

Based in New York, we have staged works at La MaMa ETC, the World Financial Center Winter Gar- den, the iconic Grace Building Plaza, Dixon Place, University Settlement, Incubator Arts Project, and chashama. From 2008 to 2010 we were the resident theatre company at the Brooklyn Lyceum. The Nerve Tank was named a Person of the Year by the New York Theatre Experience, and The Maiden was nominated by the New York Innovative Theatre Awards for Outstanding Performance Art Produc- tion in 2014.

Disciplines: Theater, Movement, Devised, Collaborative, Immersive, Classic

Project Woyzeck

This performance piece uses formalized movement, original music, and minimalist design elements to interrogate themes of authority, personhood, and programmed behavior. Inspired by Georg Buchner’s Woyzeck, the project uses additional material by Chance Muehleck that references structures and methodologies found in Peter Handke’s Kaspar. It spotlights the human desire to succeed even under the most impossible and contradictory circumstances.

This new interpretation of the classic text focuses on Woyzeck’s recurring memory of a horrific murder in the context of a life lived under the oppressive weight of grinding poverty and nationalistic forces. In spite of its heavy ideas, the piece is elegant, brightly musical, and even comic. This production uses the original fragments of the unfinished play translated by Professor David Knauf.

Production History: The University Settlement, NYC

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.nervetank.com

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 164 165 Photo: Michael Cooper Theatre Gargantua (Toronto, Canada)

Since 1992 the company has been devising original physical theatre under the leadership of Founding Artistic Director Jacquie PA Thomas. A Canadian pioneer in devised theatre and the integration of media in performance, the company’s work explores compelling subjects with daring choreography, striking designs, richly layered vocals and the innovative use of emerging technologies. The company is known for its commitment to the creative process and the unique two-year Creative Cycle through which the ensemble creates its main works including Avaricious, The Sacrifice Zone, Imprints, fIB- BER, e-Dentity, (nod), Phantom Limb, The Exit Room, love not love, Raging Dreams: into the visceral and The Trials: Fortune’s Desire.

Theatre Gargantua has garnered over 30 Dora nominations and awards for categories including Out- standing New Play, Direction, Sound Design, Set Design and Lighting Design. Tours have taken the company to the UK, with residencies at the famed Royal Exchange Manchester and Riverside Studios in London; to Oregon where Raging Dreams headlined the Portland International Performance Festi- val; and to multiple Canadian districts. In Toronto, the company has performed on many of the city’s important stages including a presentation of e-Dentity by Mirvish Productions at the renowned Royal Alexandra Theatre.

Disciplines: Theatre, Multidisciplinary

Reflector

A photographer captures a critical moment, never expecting the personal and global impact it generates. Four people, one iconic image, a billion shares.

Reflector is about tricks of the eye and how images and information can be framed and manipulated. It is about the shared image and what makes certain ones stand out in a world of 2.5 billion cameras. Reflector is an image-rich, highly physical piece that follows four individuals processing a soul-shat- tering photograph. Using several performance styles including choreography, rap and spoken word, Reflector examines how photographs deliver meaning around the world in an incredibly short time, and how that meaning can lead to action. Multiple giant movable screens engaged with non-stop projections evoke a camera-saturated world and the impact of non-stop image-capture on an evolution in human communication.

We embarked on the creation of Reflector in response to the phenomenon of a global shift in perspective caused by a single image: the photograph of Alan Kurdi, a Syrian boy who drowned while fleeing his homeland. This one shot captured the attention of the entire planet and forced the world to confront a crisis that had until then been relegated to the sidelines. It triggered a worldwide conversation about a people’s plight and achieved what four years of war coverage could not. This remarkable incident inspired us to explore the extraordinary power of images through our own signature performance style and to ask how and why photographs affect us in the profound way that they do.

Production History: World premiere November 2017, Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto, Canada

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjlKJgLB_GY&t=23s Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.theatregargantua.ca

@TGargantua https://www.facebook.com/TheatreGargantua/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 166 167 Photo: Kim Miller Theatre of Heavy Clouds (Milwaukee, USA)

Theatre of Heavy Clouds, directed by Kim Miller, moves across the fields of video and performance art, employing forms borrowed from dance, theater and stand-up comedy. As a loose collaborative, we explore the relationship between image and action, power and knowledge. Questions within the work are structured around a radical democratic model - how does gesture inform or complicate a subject? Is a radical democratic subject possible?

The DIY nature of our aesthetic is deliberate - a strategic removal from the spectacular arena of highly produced culture. We’re suspicious of the image. Theatre of Heavy Clouds also borrows elements of popular culture and vocabulary to think through ideas around power and language. The address of the ‘you’ of the spectator is also the address of the ‘me.’ What’s at stake is our subjecthood, working towards a democratic subject, hopefully and enthusiastically, without ever reaching this place.

Our use of this radical democratic model opens a conversation between viewer and performer, desta- bilizing the discrete subject and object, ‘us-and-them.’ It flexes parameters of inclusion, dislodges a certain hierarchical order, engages and erodes the position of the viewer. This dislodging and erosion makes way for other forms of engagement, other forms of being-together. Or else, in the language of Althusser, when I say ‘you,’ I have called a you into being.

Miller’s work has been shown at Anthology Film Archive, NYC; The Surburban, Oak Park; MOMA, NYC; MASS MoCA, North Adams; and Art in General, NYC.

Disciplines: Performance Art, Theater, Dance, Stand-Up

The Colony

Theatre of Heavy Cloud’s The Colony imagines a radical alternative to the avant-garde. The performance takes place within the context of an arts residency, where various participants debate capitalism, art and beauty with precision and absurd humor. The performance employs elements of dance and theater. The Colony employs both pedestrian movement and skilled dance.

Production History: in production now

Contact: [email protected]

Website: https://kimmillerkimmiller.com

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 168 169 Photo: Katherine Fleitas Theatre Smith-Gilmour (Toronto, Canada)

Smith and Gilmour studied in Paris at the School of Jacques Lecoq. They have often toured across Canada, to Russia and 14 countries in Europe, Asia. They have devoted their lives to telling stories that are unsentimental and naïve. They use the understanding of naïve to describe the process and work. Perhaps raw is a better word. They strive to make each moment of a production a transposition of life as observed. Good, bad, or ugly: they honour the character’s humanity. For this reason their approach to theatre has been recognized as revolutionary worldwide, because the movement grows out of deep emotional work – it is another means to reveal human nature rather than a style or mask that shows the performers technical skills. Their goal is to have a real connection with the audience and to mobilize their imaginations. This approach to creation has kept Theatre Smith-Gilmour unique for over three decades.

Awards: -44 Dora Award nominations (winning 9) in Toronto -Montreal English Critics Award for Best Ensemble -2 Chalmers’ Best Canadian Play Award nominations -2 Sterling nominations in Edmonton

Highlights: -Teaching/Mentorship: GRIMM; Dostoevsky’s ThE IDIOT; The Clowns -CHEKHOV shorts adapted from Anton Chekhov-Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Edmonton, Montreal, Quebec City, Dartmouth, the Hong Kong Cultural Arts Centre, Beijing, Shanghai, Macau, Taipei in China, Moscow, Russia. -LU XUN blossoms: first ever Sino-Canadian co-production in theatre in Shanghai, Beijing, Macau, Guangzhou and the Luminato Festival, Toronto LES MISERABLES at the Theatre Centre, Toronto, March 20

Disciplines: Theatre AS I LAY DYING adapted by Smith and Gilmour

On tour with As I Lay Dying

Once again we reunite with the Bundren Family. These characters haunt us, calling us, calling for life. William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying has been considered a classic since it was published in 1930. Its overt social commentary and unflinching views of family structure, abortion and God have made it controversial to the point of being banned. It is a mythic journey that speaks to every human about being human. The split narratives of Faulkner’s multiple characters expose the interior life of each Bundren as they struggle to survive. This view into the interior life of each character is what makes this story so important to us and to audiences.

Our work is meant for the eyes as much as it is for the ears. It is not mime; it is not a style but rather a minute observation of the rawness of life; it is the observation of the raw impulses and emotions mobilized by the actors as they “move the words” of the great writers, on a stage. We create a theatre of images and actions inspired by our vision. The process of revisiting and touring a production enriches us as artists. We are able to go deeper into the details of our work, furthering our understanding of the characters and problems they are confronted with. Our journey continues.....

”A wonderful and vivid translation ...you will swear you have seen live horses and rivers in flood and barns on fire as well as the strangest and most heartbreaking family” -Michael Ondaatje

”a powerful and innovative staging of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.” - Lincoln Kaye, Vancouver Observer Production History: The Theatre Centre Toronto, Canada/ Theatre Passe Muraille Toronto. Canada/ The- Fac tory Theatre Toronto, Canada/ The National Arts Centre Ottawa, Canada/ The Oakville Centre for the Arts Oakville, Canada/ The Pumphouse Theatre Calgary, Canada/ The Arts Club Theatre Vancouver, Canada Video: https://youtu.be/l-uGYmIl0fU Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.theatresmithgilmour.com @theatreSG https://www.facebook.com/TheatreSmithGilmour/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 170 171 Photo: Riksa Afiaty Tiarma Dame Ruth Sirait (Bandung, Indonesia)

Tiarma Sirait, born 1968. Live & Work in Bandung. She’s an exciting Bandung-based fashion artist who’s presenting visually provocative & thought provoking fashion art performances & always questioning all the conventional wisdoms both of the East & West. Her performance in fashion has been acknowledged by many international art institutions & she has intensively participated more than 250 exhibitions in many domestics & overseas exhibitions & has received many astonishing awards in Creativity Designs & Art Awards from many countries. In 2005, Tiarma was an Artist in Residency in Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka – Japan & in 2006 she was an Artist in Residency in Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery and Action Factory, Blackburn – England. Through her bold conceptual approaches to art, fashion design & pop culture, Tiarma has explored themes such as love & lust, foreign influences on Indonesian culture & mass consumerism to name but a few. Her art is intended to show the hyper reality in the contemporary context. She also used fashion in her painting as a medium to express the journey of her performances. She shows her exploration of her free spirit in her artwork, which uses pink as the main color. She used pink also because the color is very girly, kitsch, synthetic & this color to give an eccentric sensation for her creation. She has worked quite consistently with pink since the beginning beginning of her career as a fashion artist in 1998. It has been her signature to use this brilliant color in her artwork.

Disciplines: Fashion Art Performance, Performance Art, Theater

Climb Up the Tree & Have a Picnic...

A dress has no life of its own unless it is worn, and as soon as this happens another personality takes over from you and animates it, or tries to, glorifies or destroys it, or makes it into a song of beauty.

We are bombarded today by such a quantity of images that we can no longer distinguish direct experience from what we have seen for a few seconds on television. The memory is littered with bits and pieces of images. As you can see it today.

One way to look at the future being digital is to ask if the quality of one medium can be transposed to another.

Now, for nothing is really itself anymore. There are pieces of this and pieces of that, but none of it fits together….Everything falls apart, but not every part of everything, at least not at the same time. They regarded us as a piece of fiction-like one of their movies-which they could edit and improve.

And it sickens me in and out. Thinking who am I over and over again.

Thus, doubts and indecisions I had before were completely dissolved (again) like a piece of thawing ice. I called out loudly “How wondrous! How wondrous!”

Production History: 2007 Peptalk Performance Festival @Ronneby, Karlskrona – Sweden & 2017 Climb Up the Tree & Have a Picnic Performance @Poleng Studio, Bandung - Indonesia

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMsFX3zptx4&t=58s Contact: [email protected] Website: https://www.facebook.com/Poleng-Studio-885092764857735/

@TiarmaSirait https://www.facebook.com/Tiarma-Sirait-77992303980/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 172 173 Photo: Mark Duggan Torn Space Theater (Buffalo, USA)

Torn Space creates theater. Founded by Dan Shanahan and Melissa Meola, Torn Space Theater (TST) aims to create original, aesthetically innovative performances; to introduce internationally-renowned, contemporary performance to Western New York; and to cultivate the collaboration of actors, composers, sculptors, video artists and designers within our productions. Drawing from the leading edge of the global avant-garde, TST offers both original drama and new interpretations of existing plays. Using vivid imagery that both entertains and challenges our audience’s theatrical expectations, TST fully incorporates other arts disciplines—e.g., media, music, and the visual arts—into our design aesthetic..

Disciplines: Theater, Installation, Site-Specific, Multi-Media, Immersive

The Gathering

The Gathering is the latest installment of Torn Space Theater’s site-based work at Buffalo’s historic grain silos, where each subsequent spectacle builds on the narrative of a parallel society that resides in that otherworldly space, enacting everyday and sacred rituals which comment, celebrate, and shed light on the issues of contemporary America. The Gathering features an assemblage of people whose culture has been an approbation and intersection of race, religion, pop culture and gender. They enact and recreate acts of resistance from a collective history, while drones flying overhead symbolize an ever-present surveillance, monitoring, appropriating, and commercializing the rebellious acts, nullifying their meaning. The piece is a reminder in this age of shifting truths and technology that still resistance occurs. Still we proceed on. Still we gather. Ultimately, ‘The Gathering’ is an act of collective motion against a larger controlling force, and hope resides in this motion. The audience experienced ‘The Gathering’ on a large set of bleachers in the open air, surrounded by statuesque grain silos.

Production History: Silo City

Video: https://player.vimeo.com/video/214886108

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.tornspacetheater.com

@tornspace https://www.facebook.com/tornspacetheater Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 174 175 Photo: Ekaterina Sultanova Veronika Nicolaeva (Moscow, Russia)

Architect by training. Works in the field of graphic design, easel graphics, book and journal illustration, video art, scenography and performance.

Veronika Nicolaeva has begun her exhibition activity with a personal exhibition of graphics and continued as a member of the art group “Yellow Mountain”. She took part in a number of collective exhibitions in St. Petersburg and Moscow, including as a member of section of abstract artists of the Union of Russian Artists. She is the author of projects - performances with dancing collectives, club shows. Participant of international Biennials of graphic design and illustration competitions. Belongs on the TOP-100 list of the best designers of Russia in 2009.

She has her works published in international art catalogues and magazines of modern art in Russia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Great Britain, and the USA. Two decks of playing cards developed from the concept to design are in the Peterhof Museum of Playing Cards, in the international virtual museum “The World Playing Cards” and private collections worldwide.

Veronika Nicolaeva participated twice in the International Online Performance Festival. She showed performances in galleries and at festivals of Moscow.

«Art, and especially art of performance, is for me a beautiful provocation. Perfected, graceful, stylish, unexpectedly realized. Beauty and harmony of a “picture” can bear absolutely opposite disharmoni- ous sense, rigid or sarcastic. I am an observer who has set a riddle to solve and is watching the solving process».

Disciplines: Graphics, Design, Digital Art, Video Art, Performance

«do not Look!» (part of the «Slaughter» series)

Conceptual idea: The society has become accustomed to murder and observes it daily with total indifference. This is most spectacularly shown in regard to animal life which is treated by humans scornfully. Consumer attitudes towards the nature go against the rule that human beings are an integral part of nature. Humans forget that the rules of society do not differ greatly from pack rules. The project demonstrates the absolute defenselessness and precarious position of humans in today’s society where even putting to death becomes entertainment

The «Slaughter» series consists of several performances dedicated to criticism of contemporary society imposing numerous patterns.

Action: naked, rolled up into a ball, the author lies on a chopping block. An axe is plunged into a stub, being a tool, which can be used for its intended purpose at any time. A screen showing a video shot in a real food market in meat department is located behind.

Duration: 1 hour.

Production History: art-gallery «Solyanka VPA», Moscow Video: https://vimeo.com/242799627 Contact: [email protected] Website: https://www.veronikanicolaeva.weebly.com @art_Veronika https://www.facebook.com/nicolaeva.veronika Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 176 177 Photo: Indudipa Sinha Vikram Iyengar / Ranan (Calcutta, India)

Vikram Iyengar is a dancer, choreographer, theatre director, and performing arts researcher, writer and curator based in Calcutta, India. Co-founder and Artistic Director of the performance company Ranan, his production work is noted for the conscious bringing together of classical dance, movement, drama and design creating an experience of total theatre. His range of work in India and abroad work has brought together dancers and actors, and spans choreography for stage and film, dance and theatre explorations, and performance collaborations. In December 2015, he was awarded the Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar for the field of contemporary dance by the national Sangeet Natak Akademi.

My training, interests and journey in the performing arts permit me to easily inhabit multiple contexts, a unique position in a complex country like India. I inhabit crosscurrents of often contradictory, opposing strands, where questions of critical practice, discourse, individual and communal politics, aesthetics, form, technique, interculturalism and more constantly meet, morph, inform and inspire what I create, why, how and with who.

The spring and impulse for my work stems from my training in the north Indian classical dance form of kathak, and the kathak-informed body. I return in various ways to the question: how can kathak engage in a dialogue rather than be a monologue? It is fundamentally this exploration that excites and inspires me to re-imagine and re-invent kathak’s relevance for myself, and its perception for others, in a continuous process of discovery.

Disciplines: Dance, Kathak, Choreography Shunya Se Shunya Se (re-imagined from a 2003 production) marks a fresh chapter in my conversation with kathak emerging from my recent work with contemporary choreographers. It urges me to delve into and discover the principles of movement the form is based on, analyse the aesthetic and performance sensibilities it proposes and opposes, and constantly challenge and shift what is expected of kathak dancers and a kathak-informed body.

What could each of the five elements mean for kathak in physical rather than representational terms? Focussing on, taking apart, and re-fabricating unique ways in which kathak works with physicality, movement, space and time, the piece offers a canvas of the expected and the unexpected, silence and sound, stillness and movement, light and darkness.

Shunya Se also sees a close collaboration between the choreographic vision and music, lighting, costume and stage design. All these together attempt to craft a presentation both panoramic in scope and personal in experience. How does all this emerge out of the void, from zero… Shunya Se.

The piece premiered before a wholly uninitiated audience in Lebanon and was received with standing ovations. It has attracted a very diverse, cross-generational audience in India. It allows access into the world of kathak and abstract movement in an artistically engaging and non-threatening way, bringing about a closer, more visceral appreciation and interest. This engagement immediately shifts common perceptions of classical dance as archaic and stuck in time, to something vibrant, dynamic, alive and accessible today.

Production History: Kala Mandir, G. D. Birla Sabhagar, Gyan Manch (Calcutta); Rabindra Bhavan, XLRI (Jamshedpur); Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan (Chennai); Casino du Liban (Jounieh-Lebanon); Safadi Cultural Centre (Tripoli-Lebanon); UNESCO Palace (Beirut-Lebanon)

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_giUq6v33og Contact: [email protected] Website: http://www.vikramiyengar.in

https://www.facebook.com/RananIndia/ Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 178 179 Photo: William Skaleski William Skaleski (Milwaukee, USA)

My practice centers on the idea of being alone, concerning both the positive and the negative aspects. Loneliness is a concept I have been dealing with throughout most of my life and I feel that life experience bring out the best in me artistically. What I find best shows these concepts is by performance, either live or on video, so that I can deal with these issues with my own physical being rather than an outside source to describe it for me. One aspect of loneliness that fascinates me is the idea of comfort, on how we find certain places or objects to make us feel safe. Performing live and on video depends on the nature of the performance in terms of if there is a certain part I want to pay attention to more than the whole body. I’m always fascinated by the fetal position. To me it is the key symbol of being alone, all coiled up facing yourself with no one else surrounding you but your own body, and I always like to try to find ways to implement it in my pieces. Both the concepts of performing and being alone is a fascinating combination to me since performing for yourself would be seen as pointless with no one to share it with, but bringing the situations of loneliness in a public setting can always make for an interesting experience to bring the two opposites together.

Disciplines: Performance, Video, Movement, Body Art, Dance, Butoh

LE(T)GO

I made this piece in response of certain things in my life that my never happen, waiting on those things and moving on from them. It’s about having that little bit of play while waiting on something, kind of like anticipating your date at a fancy dinner, or even at home. The audience sees the piece in the middle of a room, with a table set up with candles, and a LEGO place mat. As the piece goes on, the figure slowly places LEGO pieces onto the mat one by one. The piece starts out visually simple, but the abstract placement of the LEGOs continues until the figure decides to not wait anymore, blows out the candles, and stops.

Production History: In progress

Video: https://www.vimeo.com/240657065

Contact: [email protected]

Website: https://www.vimeo.com/williamskaleski

@billskaleski https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?id=570602809660942&ref=content_filter Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 180 181 Photo: Michael J Rau Wolf 359 (New York City, USA)

Wolf 359 is a New York City-based company of narrative technologists. Since the company’s founding in 2007, Wolf 359 work has been shown in Berlin, Dublin, Edinburgh, Chicago, Boston, and many other cities and city-states. In New York City, their work has been seen at Joe’s Pub/The Public The- ater, the New York Film Festival’s Convergence, PS122, 59E59, the Bushwick Starr, Ars Nova, 3LD, HERE Arts Center, and Dixon Place. Founded by Michael Yates Crowley and Michael Rau, Wolf 359 is known for its “sharp-toothed” take on contemporary American life (Time Out New York). Their production Righteous Money was hailed as “a seductive and poetic tour de force,” by New York Theater Review and “an example of that sublime and uncommon marriage of good acting with good material,” by EDGE Magazine. Evanston: A Rare Comedy was chosen for the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference (spake the Huffington Post: “Prepare to be rocked!”). The Ted Haggard Monologues was a New York Magazine Critic’s Pick and was filmed by HBO. Song of a Convalescent Ayn Rand Giving Thanks to the Godhead (in the Lydian Mode) was performed at A.R.T. in Cambridge, MA and IRT Theater in New York City, where it was a Gothamist Featured Recommendation. For ten years, Wolf 359 has hosted Hearth Gods, a bimonthly party/lab for new writing in New York’s East Village. Past readers at Hearth Gods have included playwrights Jen Silver- man and Academy Award nominee Lucy Alibar, and bands Swamp Kat, Shark Shark, and Vampire Weekend.

Disciplines: Theater, Performance, Music, Installation, Digital, Media temping

Somewhere in a filing cabinet in Delaware or Indiana, there is a table that shows how long we’re expected to live. Most of us will never see it. But what if your job was to update these tables, to record the beginnings and ends of thousands of lives? What if you found the formula to predict your own lifespan?

Sarah Jane Tully, a 53-year-old actuary, is taking her first vacation in years, and you’ve been hired to cover for her. temping, the strange and comic tale of an employee’s inner life, is performed for an audience of one by a Windows PC, a corporate phone, a laser printer, and the Microsoft Office Suite. Filling in at Sarah Jane’s cubicle, you’ll update client records, send emails, and eavesdrop on intra- office romance. Each performance is unique, depending on which tasks you accomplish and which of your co-workers you decide to trust.

Production History: American Repertory Theater (ART), Cambridge, MA. The Future of Storytell- ing, NYC. The 54th New York Film Festival, Lincoln Center, NYC

Video: https://vimeo.com/106420035

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://wolf359.org

@oct1473254 https://www.facebook.com/hearthgods Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 182 183 Photo: Jonathan Velardi (top photo) Walter Wlodarczyk (bottom photo) Xandra Ibarra (Oakland, United States)

Xandra Ibarra is an Oakland-based performance artist who often performs and works under the alias of La Chica Boom. Ibarra uses hyperbolized modes of racialization and sexualization to test the boundaries between her own body and coloniality, compulsory whiteness, and Mexicanidad. Her practice integrates performance, sex acts, and burlesque with video, photography, and objects. Throughout her multiple works, she teeters between abjection and joy and problematizes the borders between proper and improper racial, gender, and queer subject.

The larger purpose of my multimedia work is to interrogate what it means to live in abjection, degradation, and the other negative feelings that we avoid. However, rather than merely celebrating negativity or turning to the positive, I attempt to discover the nuances existing in a damaged or, what I often call, fucked life. In other words, my work tracks the flat realities of what it means to live as a minor subject, rather than giving purpose or a pulse to the negative conditions that surround us. I am invested in tracing the fine line between mere subsistence and social possibility because I find that all too often we rush to create some sense of hope due to the worsening conditions of our political time. However, by doing so, we ignore the more uncomfortable places that offer key insights into what the human, a subject/object, and material life mean.My work has attempted to trace this difficult mode of existence through a variety of media--live performance, photography, video.

Disciplines: Performance Art, Photography, Film

Xandra Ibarra

Drawing from John Currin’s painting Laughing Nude (1998), this performance engages the skin and skein of race. Nude and encased in a nylon skin cocoon, the performer examines the vexed relation racialized subjects have to not only one’s own skin, but also one’s own entanglements and knots (skeins) with whiteness and white womanhood. By filling this nude cocoon with paradigmatic “white lady accoutrements” (blonde hair, ballet shoes, furs, pearls, and fake breasts), the performer visualizes and embodies the skein of race, negotiating the simultaneous joys and pains of subjection, abjection, and personhood.

The traditional art nude is valuable to me as a performance artist because it traces the historical tensions between race, sex, labor, sexuality, gender, and class, and the stakes of visibility/visuality… things I directly consider in my own work. In “Nude Laughing,” I approach the white nudes painted by John Currin, which already have a grotesque quality. I want to capture what I can of these white nudes in my brown figure/skin and enact a union between sound and gesture that can’t be captured within his still grotesque (white) painted nudes. I want to bring these nudes to life in the “wrong” body and enhance the grotesque, tactile and expressive dimensions of how I imagine white womanhood.

Production History: The Asian Art Museum (SF, USA), The Broad Museum (LA, USA), Anderson Collection (Stanford, USA), Maccarone Gallery (NYC,USA)

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.xandraibarra.com

@lachicaboom https://www.facebook.com/lachica.boom.5 Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 184 185 Photo: Jon Prichard XOXO (Charlotte, North Carolina, USA)

XOXO is a North Carolina-based ensemble engaged in creating high art and experimental entertain- ments. In practice that means developing adventurous and formally inventive new performances and unexpected adaptations of classic texts. Since 2009 XOXO has created six full length performances and two adaptations of extant texts. As an ensemble, we work to expand the limits of live theatre by inviting our audiences to produce unique meaning from collective experiences. XOXO produces open text events that prompt audiences to realize the invisible structures guiding their daily lives and con- ceive of the potential for radical transformation. This is more fun than it sounds. Our work is musical and strange, romantic and bizarre. Our work is simultaneously connected to the innovations of experimental artists globally as well as the unique experiences of audiences living in the American South.

Disciplines: Theatre, Performance, Puppetry, Sound Art, Dance

All The Dogs And Horses

Created in collaboration with composer Dylan Gilbert and designer Jon Prichard, All the Dogs and Horses explores the corrosive power of greed and vengeance using the archetypal “gunslinger” narrative of the old West. Inspired by the Acid Westerns of the 1970s this production follows The Kid and her spirit guide (a life sized talking hobbyhorse named Curtis), as they travel through the desert aveng- ing the violent death of her Ma and Pa. After a series of chance encounters with unexpected strangers, the Kid learns a lesson more powerful than vengeance. Staged with a mind bending and cartoonish aesthetic, Dogs/Horses is a funny and fearsome trip through the American Unconscious.

This production can be produced in conventional theaters or in large, unconventional spaces. The show’s dialogue and music is entirely pre recorded, so a sound system is required. The run time for the show is one hour and can be edited to fall between 45 minutes and 90 minutes.

Production History: Developed through a residency at Goodyear Arts in December 2016. Premiere at Boom Festival in April 2017. Encore Performance at The Courtroom, Rock Hill, SC in November 2017.

Contact: [email protected]

Website: http://www.xoxoperformance.org

@XOXOCLT https://www.facebook.com/xoxoCLT Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 186 Index of Disciplines

187 Index 59, 69, 71, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85, Inclusion...... 29 Acrobatics...... 11, 41 87, 93, 97, 107, 111, 115, 121, Infectious...... 123 Acting...... 31 125, 127, 135, 139, 143, 153, Installation.. 7, 19, 27, 39, 43, Activism...... 29, 129 155, 161, 167, 177, 179, 185 45, 61, 63, 93, 107, 109, 117, Adapation...... 159 Design...... 71, 141, 175 127, 135, 141, 173, 181 Aerial...... 59 Devised.11, 47, 117, 159, 163 Interactive...... 37, 123 Aerialists...... 5 Digital...... 175, 181 Intermedia...... 35 African...... 33 digital-media...... 53 Interventions...... 123 And...... 27 Disciplines.. 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, Interview...... 135 Art...... 7, 13, 15, 23, 27, 43, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, Intuition...... 35 45, 51, 63, 65, 73, 79, 81, 91, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, Kathak...... 177 93, 95, 97, 101, 107, 117, 121, 47, 49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, Life...... 69 123, 131, 155, 167, 171, 175, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77, Light...... 71, 147 179, 183, 185 79, 81, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93, Lighting...... 21, 27 Artist...... 75, 105 95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 105, 107, Live... 39, 51, 65, 91, 97, 123, artist-books...... 53 109, 111, 113, 115, 117, 119, 131 Arts...... 15, 71, 103, 109, 143 121, 123, 125, 127, 129, 131, Making...... 91 Audience...... 51 133, 135, 137, 139, 141, 143, Mask...... 115 BigArt...... 59 145, 147, 149, 151, 153, 155, Media...... 123, 181 Black...... 65 157, 159, 161, 163, 165, 167, Memoir...... 133 Body...... 151, 179 169, 171, 173, 175, 177, 179, Menditations...... 91 Box...... 65 181, 183, 185 Mime...... 149 Brazilian...... 33 Disruptive...... 123 Modern...... 33, 85 Butoh...... 77, 153, 179 Drag...... 121 Momentary...... 69 Cabaret...... 17 Drawing...... 55, 119 Movement.. 83, 147, 163, 179 CARL...... 105 Durational...... 43 Multimedia.. 81, 95, 111, 137 Caucasian...... 105 Education...... 87 Multi-Media...... 47, 173 Ceramic...... 75 Electroacoustic...... 95 Music.7, 17, 23, 29, 37, 39, 45, Ceremonies...... 9 Emotional...... 69 47, 55, 71, 81, 89, 97, 99, 107, Ceremony...... 29 Empathy...... 141 137, 139, 145, 155, 161, 181 Channeling...... 35 Engagement...... 85 New...... 123 Chinese...... 69 Ensemble...... 11, 17, 159 NewMediaArts...... 67 Choral...... 37 Essays...... 9 Notation...... 71 Choreography... 3, 25, 79, 87, Experience...... 95 Objects...... 41 127, 177 Experimental...... 105 Outdoor...... 153 Circus...... 11, 17, 59, 137 Exquisite...... 69 Painting...... 19, 53, 57, 135 Classic...... 163 Fashion...... 171 Participation...... 129 Classical...... 17 Female...... 151 Participatory...... 51, 63 Clown...... 115 Film.. 7, 39, 43, 85, 101, 103, Performance.... 3, 5, 7, 13, 15, Collaborative...... 163 155, 183 21, 23, 27, 31, 37, 39, 49, 53, Comedy...... 155 Fire...... 59 57, 61, 63, 65, 73, 75, 77, 81, Community...... 5, 43, 85 Flute...... 113 83, 85, 89, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, Composition...... 145 Foam...... 151 105, 107, 109, 111, 117, 119, Concept...... 63 Food...... 133 121, 125, 127, 131, 133, 135, Conceptual...... 73, 147 Gatherings...... 9 141, 145, 147, 149, 151, 167, ConceptualArt...... 67 Genre...... 23 171, 175, 179, 181, 183, 185 Conducting...... 113 Graphics...... 175 PerformanceArt...... 67 Contemporary.25, 27, 33, 49, Greek...... 159 Performing.71, 103, 113, 143 69, 85, 97, 143 Immersive.... 51, 95, 163, 173 Performingarts...... 153 Cross...... 23 Improvisation.3, 35, 61, 71, 77, Photography...... 57, 183 Dance...... 3, 9, 11, 13, 21, 25, 93 Phsyical...... 149 27, 29, 31, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47, Improvising...... 113 Physical.11, 17, 101, 103, 157, Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 188 159 137, 161 Plays...... 9 Visualisation...... 65 Poesis...... 123 Voice...... 19, 147 Poetic...... 61 Walking...... 77 Poetry...... 53, 73 Word...... 83, 95 Post-Modern...... 49 Workshop...... 89 Potlucks...... 9 Writing...... 81 Practice...... 13 Yarn...... 91 Practice-based...... 141 Printmaking...... 119 printmedia...... 53 Programming...... 43 Projection...... 5 Psychomagic...... 35 Public...... 37 Puppetry.... 41, 115, 151, 185 Refusal...... 123 Research...... 89, 141 Rhythmic...... 55 Ritual...... 61 Scenography...... 147 Sculpture... 7, 37, 53, 91, 119, 145 Seance...... 35 Singing...... 31 Site...... 51 Sitespecific...... 153 Site-Specific. 77, 85, 111, 173 Situ...... 79 Skin...... 151 Social...... 7, 13 SocialPractice...... 67 Sound.... 23, 27, 99, 145, 185 Specific...... 51 Spectacle...... 59 Spoken...... 83, 95 Stand-Up...... 167 Storytelling...... 3, 79 Text...... 41, 147 Theater...... 13, 25, 27, 29, 39, 43, 47, 103, 129, 145, 163, 167, 171, 173, 181 Theatre.3, 5, 7, 11, 17, 19, 23, 41, 49, 51, 79, 81, 89, 93, 101, 105, 109, 111, 115, 117, 121, 137, 139, 149, 153, 155, 157, 159, 161, 165, 169, 185 Theory...... 63 Tutoring...... 87 Video.19, 55, 79, 93, 95, 107, 117, 121, 135, 175, 179 Visual.47, 101, 103, 107, 109,

189 Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 190 191 Participate in the next Contemporary Performance Almanac 2019 by submitting your work online at https://contemporaryperformance.com/almanac19

Contemporary Performance Almanac 2018 192