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October 2007 PERFORMANCE |
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October 5: Julia
Mayer, Coffee Dance
October 5-7: Vadco/Valerie Alpert
Dance
October 12-14 & 18-21: RTG Dance
October 19-20 & 26-27: Cupola
Bobber
October 26-28: 8th Annual Women’s
Performance Art Festival
October 29: Poonie’s Cabaret
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Julia
Mayer - Coffee Dance
Friday October 5, 9:30am
Free
BYOC (bring your own coffee)
CoffeeDance enters its second year! Since July 2006, Julia
Mayer has opened her weekly Friday morning solo movement practice
to the public once a month. This successful series of engaged, informal
performances continues on the First Friday of every month at 9:30am.
Each performance will last approximately 20 minutes, with the opportunity
for discussion afterward.
As a mother and full-time worker in her forties, Julia Mayer
is exploring new paradigms for performance—places,
processes, practices—to stay active and to activate audiences
to join her in experiencing unique moments of the body moving. In
sharing her highly personal movement adventures, Julia invites audience
members to contemplate their own creative impulses.
In its first year, CoffeeDance attracted curious, insightful
audiences who valued the opportunity to start their day investigating
dance and the act of performance in an intimate setting, flooded by
daylight. Thanks in part to the rigor and success of this inquiry,
Julia has received a prestigious Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist
grant for 2007.
[her] movement is refreshingly off the map - Chicago Reader
a delicately luminous, inquisitive stage presence - TimeOut
Chicago
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Photo by William Frederking |
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Photo by ValerieAlpert |
Vadco/Valerie Alpert Dance Company
Between Skin
Friday & Saturday, October 5 & 6, 8pm
Sunday, October 7, 7pm
$15
Between Skin is a poetic exploration of the possibilities,
discoveries, rejections and limitations located in the space between
the skin of two people. Through movement, text, and projected image,
moments of contact are questioned in terms of the dynamics of intimacy
and alienation. Collaborators on this project include guest choreographer
Terry Walsh Crews and poet Sherese Mays. This program is partially
supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.
Valerie Alpert is a native of Chicago and artistic
director of VADCO/Valerie Alpert Dance Company. Before founding
her company in 1991, she was a company member with Contemporary
Dance/Fort Worth and Zenon/Jazz Dance Company, and performed assorted
repertory across the United States. Her repertory includes works
by Gus Solomons Jr., David Dorfman, Jan Erkert, Bebe Miller, Doug
Varone, and Danny Buraczeski. After receiving her MFA from The Ohio
State University in 1998, the integration of multimedia into live
performance became a trademark of the company, along with collaborating
with composers, artists, and individuals in the world of technology.
Currently Alpert is on faculty at the College of Lake County in
Grayslake, Illinois and is pursuing a PhD in Dance from Texas Woman’s
University. www.alpertdance.org
Alpert’s dance was all the more impressive for the choreographic
imagination it displayed, with brilliant counterpoint of motion,
and the discipline it demanded from the dancer – Fort
Worth Star Telegram
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RTG Dance
Once Removed: Peripeteia
Friday-Sunday, October 12-14, 8pm
Thursday-Sunday, October 18-21, 8pm
$15
Once Removed: Peripeteia reflects dancer/choreographer Rachel Thorne
Germond's research into ways that we make sense of loss and disaster.
Among its strategies, the piece collides the principles of classic
tragic drama by Aristotle with the formal, emotionally-detached
aesthetics of postmodern dance, all combined with sculptural costumes
by Pate Conaway, and a musical score by Michael Zerang incorporating
fragments of popular songs and classical music. Debuted as a work
in progress as Tragic Dance at Links Hall in June 2006, Once Removed:
Peripeteia refers to the turning point in a drama after which the
plot moves steadily to its denouement. It is discussed by Aristotle
in the Poetics as the shift of the tragic protagonist's fortune
from good to bad, which is essential to the plot of a tragedy. Performers:
Germond, Lucy Riner, Johannah Wininsky, Jeannine Salemi. Post performance
discussions follow Friday and Saturday night performances.
Rachel Thorne Germond has presented her work
in New York City at such venues as Joyce Soho, Movement Research
at Judson Church, Chashama, The Merce Cunningham Studio, and Dixon
Place; in Chicago with the Chicago Kings, JT Newman's Girlie-Q Variety
Hour, the Feast of Fools Cabaret, and at Full Circle Danztheatre
Festival, the Spare Room, the Stockyards Theater Performance Art
Festival, the Bailiwick Theater, and Around the Coyote Arts Festival;
and in other cities such as Philadelphia and Toronto. Germond earned
an MFA in dance and choreography at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana,
where she was a Fellow and taught modern, jazz, and contact improvisation.
Her training includes intensive study since 1994 of Klein/Mahler
technique with Barbara Mahler and with such notable teachers as
Mary Anthony, Anna Sokolow, Merce Cunningham, and Nancy Topf. In
2004 she formed her Chicago-based pick up company, RTG Dance. www.rtgdance.com
--Gutsy dancing, sharp satire, smart choreography - The
Philadelphia Inquirer
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Photo by Michelle Alba |
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Photography by Jennifer Korff |
Cupola Bobber
The Man Who Pictured Space From His Apartment
Fridays & Saturdays, October 19-20 & 26-27, 8pm
$10
1359 N. Maplewood, Chicago
With an eye on vaudeville, the night sky, and the note, If I
die, my knowledge may die with me, Cupola Bobber's new performance
investigates the stars, the railroad, and their memories in a struggle
to pinpoint something infinitely satisfying. Imagining the possibilities
implied by the sudden conquering of space in the style of Buster
Keaton, and building a universe out of cardboard, Cupola Bobber
discover a beautiful moment built like a monument.
Mixing basic materials with homespun engineering,
Cupola Bobber tinkers with reality by creating imagery that hangs
between staged theatrics and the utterly familiar. They will convert
a confined interior space into an expansive nightscape, including
two small towers made from cardboard toy bricks. They achieve height,
breaking free, and defying gravity to feel something new, different...
to feel joy and progress.
Cupola Bobber is collaboration between Stephen
Fiehn and Tyler Myers. Founded in 1999,
they have previously created two evening-length performances: 2001’s
Subterfuge and 2004’s Petitmal. They have
performed at the PAC/edge Performance festival, The Spareroom, and
Links Hall in Chicago; Performance Works Northwest in Portland,
OR; and at The Cue Arts Foundation in NYC as part of a project curated
by Goat Island. They also performed a durational work, Light
Curve, in Chicago’s Millennium Park as part of the Great
Performers of Illinois Festival. In 2002, they made a video installation,
Study For a Performance, in the salt flats just east of
Wendover, UT. Their published writing includes A Conversation
in 50 Jumps Using a Trampoline and A Cliff in JUMP, an
anthology on jumping, and Internal Monologue for One Performer
Taking One Step Slowly in SLOW. They have served as
visiting artists for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s
First Year Program and for Goat Island’s Summer School. Petitmal
received a Best of PAC/edge award, and they won a pair of Nelson
Raymond Fellowships from The School of the Art Institute with their
BFA’s in 2001. Stephen Fiehn also plays in the bands Fessenden
+ WORK; Tyler Myers also makes work with the Chicago art collective
Lucky Pierre. www.cupolabobber.com
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Stockyards Theatre Project
8th Annual Women's Performance Art Festival:
A Fierce Presence
Friday & Saturday, October 26-27, 8:00pm
Sunday, October 28, 7:30pm
$15 ($10 students)
Each year, the Women's Performance Art Festival features a full
schedule of Chicago artisans performing original works via improv,
standup comedy, dance, performance art and much more. This year's
theme, A Fierce Presence, will feature unique female perspectives
on humor, balance and what it takes to excel. Submissions are being
accepted with a deadline of September 15. The Women's Performance
Art Festival is sponsored in part by the Illinois Arts Council.
Stockyards Theatre Project was recently recognized
by American Theatre Magazine for their new program
Play for Keeps. Now in its second year, the program pairs actresses
with writers in order to create new theatre pieces. www.stockyardstheatreproject.org
...the festival is the purist woman's performance event in Chicago
- Chicago Sun-Times
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Poonie’s Cabaret
Monday, October 29, 8pm
$5
Poonie’s Cabaret is Links Hall’s venue for
improvisation and works in progress, featuring artists working in
many different creative realms (dance, music, puppetry, performance
art, theatre, voguing, freestyle rapping, drag, burlesque, cheerleading,
stand-up comedy, etc) and named in loving memory of Chicago dancer/choreographer
Poonie Dodson. Proceeds from the Cabaret go to the Duncan Erley
Coming Out of the Closet Fund, which is periodically awarded to
artists whose work explores the realms of healing, gay activism,
and spiritual and sexual transformation. Hosted & curated by
Jyl Fehrenkamp.
Artists include:
Toybox Theatre
J'Sun Howard
Claire DeLune
Mandy Price
Barry ManBelow & CeCe Wonder
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