Links Hall: Opportunities

Joshua Kent is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago. His work, which engages issues of agency and the negotiations of authorship, has been shown in cities throughout the U.S., including Chicago, Minneapolis, and Boston. He graduated in 2010 from the performance department of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he was a Presidential Merit Scholar. As the culmination of his LinkUp Residency Joshua Kent will debut his new performance, Under the Roses.

Under the Roses is an image-based performance, which seeks to exist in a place unknown to itself, while simultaneously laying itself bare.

Drawing upon the stylized movement vocabularies of ballet, yoga, and professional athletics, the piece is performed by a body unformed by the rigorous training these disciplines require. Thus the work becomes weighted by desire, without release of sublimation. It is a hand outstretched.

Though layered with text, both original and appropriated, the work strives to exist without previously mediated notions of language and experience. These contradictions, or perhaps impossibilities are where the work resides.

Seeking to encounter something outside itself, moving with an aching slowness and an urgency which borders on terrifying, Under the Roses reaches for transcendence, lifting its heft with delicacy and force.

Mystical Bootcamp by Aurora Tabar and Sara Zalek in collaboration with Charlie Malave and Bryan Saner

Charlie Malave aka Charlie Universe is a musician, soundmaker, recording maker, and general collaborator. He flirts with a lot of ideas and is excited to be working with Aurora, Bryan, and Sara on this project.

Bryan Saner is an interdisciplinary art practitioner focusing on the creation of performances, activist art events and appropriately designed objects. He has made a long-term commitment to collaborate closely with artists and activists in developing alternative creative, educational and economic communities, both in and outside of existing established systems. Embracing pedagogy as integral to his practice, he teaches workshops, mentors and lectures locally, nationally and internationally on the subject of performance, the body, neighborhood design, movement and collaboration.

Aurora Tabar is an interdisciplinary artist, teacher, and healer who is concerned with bodily awareness and the physical inter-connectivity between individuals. For the past six years she has worked collaboratively to create public actions, site-specific performances and installations around Chicago and beyond. Inspired by the life and work of individuals such as Jack Smith, Tatsumi Hijikata, and Teching Hsieh, she studies the line between art and life and the possibility for transformation, both for performers and witnesses. Currently she is a teaching artist through the Hyde Park Art Center, where she combines visual arts training and movement as a foundation for individual expression and creative problem solving skills. She is studying to be a yoga teacher at Tejas Yoga and practices Traditional Thai Massage.

Sara (Thompson) Zalek is a performance artist, designer, poet, dreamer. She has been privately documenting her thoughts, drawings, and dreams in journals that span her life. Primarily, she is obsessed with the body in crisis, the hope of transformation, and the regeneration of energy through movement. She tasks herself with performing radical adventures in order to become the storyteller, the witness, and the inspirator. She has worked on solo, collaborative, and ensemble works that re-create mythology, rituals, and fairy tales. She hopes to build community through art practice. www.saratonin.com

Mystical Bootcamp is a ritual performance journey into the vortex. Inspired by shamanism, Mary Wigman, magic, animals, the Occupy movement, Kazuo Ohno, calisthenics of the Royal Canadian Air Force, Yvonne Rainer, and biodynamic agriculture, we investigate how creating a performance can be an act of healing. We invite the audience into a shamanistic complex in which audience, performers, and performance space together create a field of magic. Sara will lecture on biodynamic preparations. Aurora will conduct a dance of American nationalism. Bryan will become a crow and Charlie will create sonic vibrations. With dance, masks, and ritual drama as our tools, we invoke a transformation.

LINKUP RESIDENCIES