Pam Tzeng (Calgary, AB): “A Meditation on the End” by Jo-Lee
Dance/Physical Storytelling/Clown

© Marc J Chalifoux Photography 2017

In her first performance with the Risk/Reward Festival, Calgary performance artist and choreographer Pam Tzeng introduces us to her alter-ego Jo Lee as she uses the process of grief to explore the interplay of abstract and literal.

BIO

Pam Tzeng is a Calgary-based dance artist, performer, choreographer and teacher. Her artistic journey has taken her across Canada, Europe, Taiwan and Brazil. After graduating from the University of Calgary with a B.Sc. in Biology, she went on to nurture her artistic development though freelance education and direct work experience. Tzeng’s interests lie in both solo creation and experimental collaborative projects. Abstract, non-linear narratives often become the frame for her investigations. She is drawn to illusion and discovering new ways of animating object and the body. Coloured by her identity as a Canadian-born Taiwanese woman, Tzeng’s work explores the negotiation between cultural borders and social identities, as well as the tensions between traditional and contemporary mores within the Canadian mosaic.

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

With death in arms, then at her feet, Jo-Lee muses on what has given her unconventionally conventional life meaning. With this new work, Tzeng leaps into fragmented memories of an imagined “other”, crafting a poetic and playful theatrical dance that embraces existential longing and mortality. It is an attempt to engage with notions of death and spirituality and to artistically mine the emotional landscape of grief. In the development of the work Tzeng has found inspiration in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, researching the Buddhist concept of ‘bardos’ – the state of existence between two lives, after death and before one’s next birth. The work also draws from a fascination with the phenomenon of life flashing before ones eyes in near death experiences. Enter into the bardos with Jo-Lee as she comes to grips with mortality, finding solace in the face of the “beckoning silence.”

CLICK HERE TO SEE REHEARSAL FOOTAGE OF THIS WORK

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Pepper Pepper (Portland, OR): Diva Practice (solo)
Dance

Risk/Reward welcomes back Pepper Pepper’s particular brand of irreverent self-reflection which has graced many a Portland stage (and beyond!), including hosting the wildly successful annual event Critical Mascara: A Post-Realness Drag Extravaganza at PICA’s TBA Festival. Diva Practice (Solo) shows drag queens dancing in the face of uncertainty because being fabulous takes practice, focusing on the body as a site of history and somatic storytelling mapping how “specialness” constructs identities of privilege, queerness, gender and trauma.

BIO

Kaj-anne Pepper (Pepper Pepper) is a multidisciplinary artist working in performance, drag, theatre and dance. Kaj-anne’s fabulous drag persona “Ms. Pepper Pepper” is a humorous yet thoughtful gender-bending MC and entertainer. Together, they explore vulnerability, artifice and identity while turning tragic into magic and trauma into drama. Pepper has premiered new work at festivals, nightclubs, and alternative venues nationally at Pica’s T:BA Festival, Risk/Reward, Dance +, Austin International Drag Festival, NYC’s Hot!fest of Queer Performance and internationally at OFF! Biennale Budapest.

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

Could you imagine a drag queen’s birthday/marriage/graduation/coronation/ funeral/celebration all wrapped in one? How about listening to conflicting stories about unique/fake/historical/real/joyful exchanges with imaginary friends at said celebration? Will you watch her as she stutters and shakes, prances and preens between syrupy stillness and pauses filled with somatic touch? Imagine the deliberation and articulation of Alexander technique dancing with the grotesque determination of Butoh. Rhythms of pop music while lip-synching and warbling to music that may or may not be audible. Soft subtle self-indulgences and articulations of spine and face. Eyes closed. The invitation to know something is being felt. A welcoming stillness followed by fingers mapping the muscles of lip and jaw. Hands on heart. Back of hand on pelvis. A soft mutter “I am here”. Pop music fades in, a drag lip-synch from the inside out.

VIEW VIDEO SAMPLES OF PEPPER’S PREVIOUS WORK

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Donal Mosher & Shannon Stewart (Portland, OR
& New Orleans, LA): 
Strange Gardens
Dance

Photo by Donal Mosher.

Strange Gardens is a collaborative performance work by filmmaker/writer/musician Donal Mosher and choreographer Shannon Stewart. The project proposes using HIV as a frame that allows a broader look at the poetics of the interaction between our interior concepts of the body, the science imagery that shape those concepts.

BIO

Shannon Stewart is a choreographic artist, dance filmmaker and writer from the Pacific Northwest, living in New Orleans. As a performer and choreographer she has toured internationally, including interpreting the works of Tino Seghal, Deborah Hay, Joan Jonas, zoe | juniper, tEEth, and many others.

Donal Mosher is a filmmaker, photographer, writer, and musician. He is the collaborative director (with Michael Palmieri) of the award wining documentary features October Country, Off Label and the shorts Rougarouing, Marseilles, and Peace in the Valley. Alongside filmmaking he has published fiction, non-fiction, and reviews including a contribution to the LAMBDA Award winning anthology Portland Queer. His recent photographic work The Vibrancy Is Killing Me was on exhibition in Munich, Germany in 2015.

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

Using the vivid side-effect dreams caused by HIV medication as a starting point, Strange Gardens examines the ways we physically see and imaginatively conceptualize the body and illness. The project places photographic images, texts, audio, and video material drawn from personal and public HIV dream experiences alongside an archival history of the micro-visual technologies that have shaped our cultural ideas of the body, disease, and viruses since the19th century. The project also contains film and audio commentary by artist, doctors, and cultural theorists. Strange Gardens is designed to be a lecture-style performance that brings all these elements together with a live narration and accompanying onscreen video.

VIEW VIDEO SAMPLES OF DONAL’S PREVIOUS WORK

VIEW VIDEO SAMPLES OF SHANNON’S PREVIOUS WORK

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Linda Austin Dance (Portland, OR): A world, a world
Dance

Photo by Jeff Forbes.

Risk/Reward Festival welcomes back one of Portland’s most cherished choreographers, Linda Austin, with a work-in-progress excerpt of A world, a world, a dance comprising the 3rd chapter of a three-year arc of work collectively titled (Un)Made. This final chapter is structured around the performers’ relationships to two interrelated worlds: one, saturated, fractured, information-heavy; and the other, more spacious, minimal, and meditative.

BIO

Linda Austin, whose career spans nearly 35 years, is a choreographer and performer who creates both improvisational and highly choreographed works that are non-linear, poetic, and often laced with humor, deploying movement that often disrupts the “dancerly.” Her working process brings each performer’s vulnerabilities, strengths, accidental awkwardness, and elegance into a web of relationships with other bodies, objects, environments, sounds, and media.

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

This excerpt of of A world, a world will reference the first “world”, in which a patterned mural matches performers in similarly patterned costumes. Body blends with body, body is camouflaged against setting, borders between one being and others are blurred. The dancers produce a constant low-level, barely or sporadically decipherable humming, mumbling, and singing of a textual collage from news headlines, songs & poetry, periodically going to headphones mounted on a movable step unit, to receive and channel sound bites referencing the worlds of politics, pop culture, “high” culture, science and philosophy, riffing on these sound bites until they need another “hit.” The dancing references sports scrums, folk dance-like patterns, trance and other motifs in which the individual “disappears” into group, setting, or inwardly into self, inspired by social, cultural, and natural spheres. Throughout, borders of the self are interrogated through the push-pull between autonomy and “groupness.”

VIEW VIDEO SAMPLES OF LINDA’S PREVIOUS WORK

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Marcus Youssef and James Long – Winners and Losers

Marcus and Jamie are two of Vancouver’s most prominent theatre makers. We are incredibly excited to help bring them to Portland!

It seems like I’ve known these two forever as they are some of the most welcoming hosts for my annual pilgrimage to the PuSh Festival in Vancouver, BC.

My first encounter with either of these artists was in 2010, seeing Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut by Theatre Replacement featuring James Long in a full body bunny suit. It was a fascinating piece about creating art with found objects (in this case a discarded photo album) and the way we project stories onto images. Since then we’ve shared many conversations and cocktails leading to this current moment. There are so many collaborators in this piece, it’s a veritable “who’s who” of Canadian theatre!

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

Winners and Losers is a staged conversation that embraces the ruthless logic of capitalism, and tests its impact on our closest personal relationships as well as our most intimate experiences of self.

Theatre artists and long-time friends Marcus Youssef and James Long sit at a table and play a game they made up, called winners and losers. In it, they name people, places or things — Tom Cruise, microwave ovens, their fathers, rainforests, druids, etc. — and debate whether these things are winners or losers. As each seeks to defeat the other, the debate becomes highly personal, as they dissect each other’s individual, familial and class histories. And because one of these men is the product of economic privilege, and the other not, the competition very quickly begins to cost.

READ: “Virtuoso wordplay gives way to nasty verbal sparring in this tour de force” Paula Citron, Globe and Mail. May 23, 2013.

READ: “Winners and Losers Hits the Bullseye”Village Voice

READ: “Now Playing: Winners and Losers”. The New Yorker.

READ/VIEW: “Friendship Frays, a Topic at a Time” Charles Isherswood, The New York Times. February 1, 2015.

READ: “Winners and Losers is one of the best shows of the season” Colin Thomas, The Georgia Straight. November 26, 2012.

WATCH OUR VIDEO TRAILER FOR WINNERS AND LOSERS

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BIOS

THEATRE REPLACEMENT

Theatre Replacement is an ongoing collaboration between James Long and Maiko Bae Yamamoto. Whether working together or apart, we use extended processes to create performances from intentionally simple beginnings. Our work is about a genuine attempt to coexist. Conversations, interviews and arguments collide with Yamamoto and Long’s aesthetics resulting in theatrical experiences that are authentic, immediate and hopeful. www.theatrereplacement.org

NEWORLD THEATRE

Neworld Theatre creates, produces, and tours new plays and performance events. We tell stories that are as complicated and contradictory as the enormously small country we live in. Historically, our work is rooted in an experience of ethnic and cultural diversity. While diversity remains a core value, our programming now asks a broader range of questions about political responsibility, identity, and difference. We ask artists and audiences to embrace work which challenges assumptions about the nature of theatre and its function in the world www.neworldtheatre.com

MARCUS YOUSSEF (writer/performer)

Marcus’ plays include Winners and Losers, Leftovers, Jabber, How Has My Love Affected You?, Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil, Everyone, Adrift, Peter Panties, Chloe’s
Choice and A Line in the Sand. They have been performed dozens of times at theaters and festivals across North America, Australia and Europe, including: the Dublin Theatre Festival, Soho Rep, Festival Trans Ameriques, PuSh Festival (four times), Noorderzon (Netherlands), Ca Foscari (Venice), Brno Festival (Czech), Aarhus Festival (Denmark), On the Boards (Seattle) the Magnetic North Festival (five times), and many others. Marcus’ essays, journalism and fiction have appeared in Vancouver Magazine, the Vancouver Sun, Grain, This Magazine, the Georgia Straight, The Tyee, and many programs on CBC Radio and TV.

Awards and nominations include: Governor General’s, Rio-Tinto Alcan Performing Arts, Chalmer’s Canadian Play, Seattle Times Footlight, Arts Club Silver Commission, and Vancouver Critics’ Choice (three times). Marcus is Artistic Director of Vancouver’s Neworld Theatre, sits on the city’s Arts and Culture Policy Council, and co-founded the East Vancouver production hub, PL1422. He has served on the faculties of Concordia and Capilano Universities, teaches widely, and is currently a Canadian Fellow to the International Society of Performing Arts. neworldtheatre.com, @marcusyoussef, marcusyoussef.com

JAMES LONG (writer/performer)

James Long has been making theatre since 1995 and currently artistic directs Theatre Replacement with Maiko Bae Yamamoto. The company’s work has been presented in 40 cities and venues across North America and Europe and includes Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut, Sexual Practices of the Japanese, BIOBOXES: Artifacting Human Experience, WeeTube, Dress me up in your love, The Greatest Cities in the World, Winners and Losers and Kate Bowie among others. Upcoming works with TR include Town Criers and Three Lectures on the North. As a freelance artist he has worked as a director, writer and actor with Rumble Productions, Neworld, urban ink, Leaky Heaven Circus (now Fight with a Stick), The Only Animal, The Chop Theatre, CBC radio and The Electric Company, among others. Recent favorite freelance work includes: Morko and its upcoming partner piece Loch – both site oriented performances created with visual artist and animator Cindy Mochizuki; How To Disappear Completely created for the Chop Theatre with lighting designer Itai Erdal: and, with Neworld, a new incarnation of the King Arthur story as told by Niall McNeil and Marcus Youssef. In addition to creating new work, James has taught performance and methods of creation to established artists across Canada and to students at The University of British Columbia, The University of Regina, Simon Fraser University, Studio 58 and Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts. He is a graduate of SFU’s School of Contemporary Arts.

CHRIS ABRAHAM

Chris Abraham has been the Artistic Director of Crow’s Theatre since 2007. At Crow’s, he has directed numerous productions including Eternal Hydra, I,Claudia, Boxhead, The Country, and Instructions to any future socialist government wishing to abolish christmas. Chris is a multi-award winning theatre and film director, dramaturg and teacher who has worked with Canada’s foremost artists and theatres, including the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Canadian Stage Company, Tarragon Theatre, Segal Centre, Centaur Theatre, Globe Theatre, Theatre Junction, among many others. In 2000, he co-founded and was the Co-Artistic Director of Bill Glassco’s Montreal Young Company. In 2003, Chris directed the film adaptation of Kristen Thomson’s award winning hit I,Claudia for which he won a Gemini award. The film was also named one of 2004′s top ten Canadian films by the Toronto International Film Festival.

A graduate of the National Theatre School’s directing program, Chris later served as Co-Director of the school’s renowned directing program (2006-2010). Chris was the recipient of the John Hirsch and Ken MacDougall awards and the Siminovitch award for Directing in 2013, as well as the Siminovitch protege award in the award’s inaugural year. Chris has directed the highly lauded Stratford Shakespeare Festival productions of For The Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, The Little Years, The Matchmaker, Othello in 2013 and returns in 2014 to direct A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Chris lives in Toronto with his wife, actor Liisa Repo-Martell, their daughter Hazel and son Leo.

 

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Cherdonna Shinatra – Worth My Salt

5 -live - dying swan - by Jenny May Peterson

We’re thrilled to welcome Cherdonna Shinatra back to Portland!

Cherdonna burst into the Risk/Reward hall of fame at our 2010 Festival of New Performance with Lou Henry Hoover and The Cherdonna and Lou Show. The duo brought down the house with the wildly entertaining IT’S A SALON! and our audiences have been clamoring for more ever since. Cherdonna occupies a unique space between contemporary dance, drag, clown, and performance art – just the type of uncategorizable goodness that Risk/Reward stands for. We can’t wait to reconnect Portland with Cherdonna and her full-length debut, WORTH MY SALT.

BIO

JODY KUEHNER is a Seattle-based dance artist, director, and drag queen CHERDONNA SHINATRA. Cherdonna takes what you recognize about dance, what you believe about drag, what intrigues you about improvisation and what delights you about entertainment, effortlessly tosses it in a mason jar, shakes it up, and opens the lid. Cherdonna exists between dimensions and quantum shifts in time through everyday objects and emotions. While she provides a brightly decorated avenue to explore and question what is “normal”, she remains a child, innocent of rancor. Cherdonna is aggressively sweet. She is always seeking (even while struggling), what is beautiful and shiny. She lives for the light. The subtext is the made-up surface belying what exists beneath and the commentary of truth beyond what’s advertised.

She is a 2015 Stranger Genius Award winner, Velocity Dance Center’s 2014 Artist in Residence, and 2010 Spotlight Award winner. Her choreography has been presented by every major contemporary dance venue in Seattle. Jody received a National Dance Project Production Grant for a new work that will premiere in Seattle 2016/17 seasons at On the Boards and Velocity Dance Center and will tour the US. Jody has worked with Dayna Hanson as Production Coordinator and Assistant Director for various projects. She has been a company member of Mark Haim and Pat Graney since 2008 also assisting Graney’s KTF Prison Project in 2007.  As Cherdonna, she currently performs regularly with drag-queen superstar BenDeLaCreme (RuPaul’s Drag Race); and the award-winning international sensations Kitten LaRue and Lou Henry Hoover.  Kuehner teaches Professional Contemporary Dance at Velocity, has taught at summer intensives Strictly Seattle and Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation.  She is Resident Choreographer for the LGBTQ youth choir Diverse Harmony, and has developed a Drag You workshop which she has taught nationally for movers of all backgrounds and abilities.

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

A one-of-a-kind dance/theater spectacular by Seattle’s incomparable drag-clown phenomenon. Drawing on Carl Sagan’s series Cosmos and female icons Kate Bush and Diane Keaton– Worth My Salt looks at the timely theme of gender inequity through the lens of an existential crisis. How do we prove our worth? How do we feel worthy? Cherdonna’s unique vision brings together dance and drag with clowning’s ability to tug on heartstrings, cabaret’s warm intimacy, and performances’ ability to shatter taboos to make sharp social commentary.

WATCH OUR VIDEO TRAILER FOR WORTH MY SALT

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VIDEO VAULT: WATCH CHERDONNA AND LOU’S IT’S A SALON!

READ: The Inexplicable, Fascinating Cherdonna Shinatra, the Drag Queen Who’s Not a Drag Queen.” Christopher Frizzelle, The Stranger. September 10, 2014.

READ: A Fiendish Conversation with Jody Kuehner (Cherdonna Shinatra)”. Seth Sommerfeld, Seattle Met. October 13, 2014. 

READ/VIEW: Cherdonna Was Not Photoshopped Falling into That Swimming Pool—She Really Fell In!” Kelly O, The Stranger Slog. September 11, 2014.

READ: The Perverse, Psychedelic Vulnerability of Cherdonna Shinatra”. Brendan Kiley, The Stranger. October 22, 2014

READ: ‘Do You Think This is Easy for Me’ asks Cherdonna Shinatra”. Melody Datz Hansen, Seattle Dances. October 22, 2014

Suniti Dernovsek – Leading Light

Suniti 2 - by Meghann Gilligan

The world premiere of Leading Light is coming soon!

Suniti first collaborated with Risk/Reward in the 2009 Risk/Reward Festival under the moniker Hot Little Hands with a piece called Always Merry and Bright, which was an excerpt of a larger work titled Ill-Starred. Two years later, she brought an excerpt of Palace of Crystal to the 2011 Risk/Reward Festival. She’s one of our all-time favorite local choreographers and we can’t wait to experience this new work with powerhouse collaborators like Allie Hankins and Holland Andrews!

BIO

Suniti Dernovsek is a choreographer, performer and movement educator. For several years she collaborated with visual artist David Stein to make work under the name, bobbevy. Together they created 19 shorter works and six evening-length shows: This is how we disappear (2013); Palace of Crystal (2011); ill-starred (2009); Lawn of the Limp(2008); Avian Fable (2007); and Marionette (2004). Suniti received her BFA in dance from UWM in 2003, where she had the opportunity to work with many talented choreographers including Zvi Gotheiner, Janet Lily, Heidi Latsky, Simone Ferro and Long Zhao. While in the Midwest, she was a company member of both Foothold Dance Performance and Wild Space Dance Company. She has performed with Oslund+Co, Fever Theater and Teeth. She has been presented by PICA’s TBA festival, Conduit Dance, Reed College Arts Week, Danceworks, Velocity Dance Center, Northwest New Works at On the Boards, Danspace, Ten Tiny Dances’ South Waterfront Project, Foothold Dance Performance, Starling Gallery, the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and Danspace in NYC representing UWM and she has received two residencies at Caldera Arts. Suniti received a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council in 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2015 as well as the Dance New Work Award from UWM in 2009. Suniti teaches weekly yoga classes and retreats through The People’s Yoga in NE Portland.   

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

In her latest work, Portland-based dance maker Suniti Dernovsek stages a hypnotic performance that marries intricate choreographic detail with an original sound score performed live by Holland Andrews. Initially inspired by the tragic life of the Italian-Egyptian singer Dalida, Leading Light offers a haunting meditation on the troubled boundary between public expectations and private vulnerabilities. Powerhouse performances by Allie Hankins and Dernovsek evoke the precariousness of the feminine ideal, at once dynamic and posturing, yet casting an ever-present shadow of fragility.

ABOUT DALIDA

Iolanda Cristina Gigliotti (17 January 1933 – 3 May 1987), best known as Dalida, was an Italian Egyptian singer and actress who performed and recorded in more than 10 languages, including Arabic, Italian, Greek, German, French, English, Japanese, Hebrew, Dutch and Spanish. In 1961 she acquired French citizenship upon marriage, while maintaining her original Italian one.

Dalida ranks among the six most popular singers in the world. Her sales figures today would amount to more than 170 million albums worldwide. Twice honored with “The World Oscar of success of the disc”, she is the only European singer to have won this Oscar at least once. Her 30-year career commenced in 1956 and ended with her last album in 1986, a few months before her death. She received 70 gold records and was the first singer to receive a diamond disc.

Despite enormous career success, Dalida’s private life was marred by a series of failed relationships and personal problems. Her death led to an iconic image as a tragic diva and renowned singer and she has since become a cult figure to a new generation of fans.

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SOURCES:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalida

ON DEMAND: Frédérick Gravel – Usually Beauty Fails

Deux couples 300CR

Portland, get ready for Frédérick Gravel!

I was lucky to catch Usually Beauty Fails at the PuSh Festival in Vancouver, B.C. in late January. I had heard rave reviews and some skepticism when the piece toured to Seattle at On the Boards the week prior (where the film we are screening was captured). I was in awe of many parts of this piece – the raw energy of the performers, the incredible live music, the casual humor in Gravel’s addresses to the crowd, and the incredible intimacy that traveled back 30 rows to where I was sitting. Hopefully we will see Gravel’s work live on our stages soon, but until then I’m excited to be able to bring this film version of Usually Beauty Fails to Portland!

BIO

Frédérick Gravel is a dancer, choreographer, guitarist, singer, and lighting designer whose work is presented not only in underground performance spaces in Montreal and New York, but at scholarly symposia as well. Gravel cultivates artistic ambiguity, cultural meeting points, the mixing of disciplines, and post-modern irony. He plays with the contemporary zeitgeist; flippant and skeptical. He is complicit with the audience, thumbing his nose at the avant-garde; at the exclusive preserves of the elite. In lucid, offhand fashion, he takes popular culture and establishment culture out of their assigned roles and brings them together.

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

Socio animalus. Three musicians plugged into the power grid, six dancers ready to explode, the energy of Pop to intensify the beat, the energy of desire to set things ablaze. Quebec’s Frédérick Gravel ignites bodies and blows up the stage in Usually Beauty Fails, a surrealist and unbridled metaphor about our relation to beauty, the shock of love and the challenges of relationships. The performers’ combination of physical restraint and furious involvement produces a nervous dialog made of projected bodies, ruptures, false starts, repetitions and aborted gestures. No more gender-related clichés, all individualities are asserted: desiring and desired beings make use of symbols and their own bodies to better arouse the audience. The choreographer-dancer-musician grabs the microphone to distil with humor and impertinence a speech about dance and humans as social animals. An audacious integration of popular culture and choreographic art; an invigorating and carnal work that posits conflict as art and elevates reality’s imperfections to the rank of most efficient aesthetic.

Once more bringing together dancers and musicians in a space where choreographic show and concert are interwoven, Quebec’s Frédérick Gravel plays with the codes of contemporary dance and pop culture to question their respective canons. Built upon a series of short scenes in the manner of Gravel Works (which itself preceded Tout se pète la gueule, chérie), the work goes by like the songs of a sweet and savoury album about the fury of life, our unease at experiencing beauty and the difficulty in finding harmonious contact points in relationships.

Inspired by the aesthetic of videos where the desire to please is so strong that they become quasi-pornographic, the choreographer exacerbates frontality and tackles the game of seduction in group movements where dancers are as vulnerable as provocative. It is difficult for the public to remain indifferent to this silent appeal. But from one sequence to the next, the atmosphere transforms itself, we are plunged into another universe : guitarist, dancer and sometimes also singer, Gravel grabs the microphone in between two songs, like an irreverent M.C., and takes a few jabs at contemporary dance clichés as he breaks the fourth wall.

In the sections where the duo embodies the paradox of relationships that the body calls for but that the mind refuses, he refines his aesthetic of the accident, using physical constraints to generate conflicts that in turn produce movement. Combining choreographed and reflex gestures, the dancing results from a succession of frictions, accidents and failures that reveal the nature of beings endowed with wild vitality and unstoppable perseverance despite their repeated setbacks. No exuberance, no lyricism, no crisis nor any other theatrical construction. The movements are raw. The hips and the eyes carry the strong emotional and sexual charge. Dancing bodies in the instant of instinct. Animality and candor of the human beings stripped of his or her masks and judgment filters.

As a choreographic entity integral to the show, the live music sets the tone and gives a color and a direction, or on the contrary, appears to break an image, sweeps through a scene like a tidal wave. Perfectly integrated to the mise-en-scene, the bodies of the musicians bring us back to the reality of the show’s space-time, offering the spectator a perspective on the fiction created through the abstraction of the dance.

Like all previous works by Frédérick Gravel, Usually Beauty Fails was created in close collaboration with all members, dancers and musicians of GAG : the Grouped’ArtGravelArtGroup. (Text: Fabienne Cabado / Translation : Michel Moussette)

WATCH OUR VIDEO TRAILER FOR USUALLY BEAUTY FAILS

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READ A REVIEW OF USUALLY BEAUTY FAILS BY VANGUARD SEATTLE

Allie Hankins – Like a Sun That Pours Forth Light but Never Warmth

allie-ancient-lakes-007

Allie Hankins’ full-length debut is on the way!

Allie’s first performance in Portland was at the 2011 Risk/Reward Festival. She choreographed and performed a piece titled By Guess & By God under the moniker Part & Parcel with fellow dancer Mary Margaret Moore. Since then, she has become one of the most most talked about artists in PDX. We can’t wait to behold Like a Sun That Pours Forth Light but Never Warmth after several years of development!

BIO

Allie Hankins is a choreographer, performer, and researcher currently residing in Portland and Seattle. She is an inaugural member of FLOCK — a new dance center that serves as a creative home to Portland’s experimental dance artists — and a founding member of Physical Education: a casual/critical reading & research/dance & performance body comprised of herself, keyon gaskin, Taka Yamamoto, and Lucy Lee Yim. In Portland Allie works/collaborates with choreographer Tahni Holt, composer Jordan Dykstra, Noor, and Zac Pennington (Parenthetical Girls/Crying). Her work has been presented at On the Boards’ Northwest New Works Festival and Velocity Dance Center in Seattle, Conduit Dance and Studio 2 in Portland, the Robert Rauschenberg 19th St. Project Space in New York, and various venues in Minneapolis, Albuquerque, Vienna, and Berlin.   

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

A correspondence between choregrapher Allie Hankins and Ballet Russes danseur noble Vaslav Nijinsky.

Appropriating Nijinsky’s obsessive repetition, approach-avoidance, and sexual deviancy, Hankins constructs an amalgamation of herself and the notoriously troubled dancer. As imitation dissolves into disorientation and false memories, Hankins endures with a persistance  unique to bodies in spiritual crises—confronting isolation and desperation in the pursuit of corporeal transcendence.

Against a backdrop of lurid color and gold-bathed muscle, Hankins negotiates the impermanence of identity, and the volatility of solitary retrospection. Embodying movement’s capacity to engender lust, repugnance, confusion, and ultimately elation, Like a Sun inhabits the space between confinement and liberation, reality and fantasy, myth and man.

ABOUT VASLAV NIJINSKY

Nijinsky (1890-1950) remains, by reputation, the outstanding male dancer of at least one century, and a pathbreaking choreographer as well. Celebrated for his spectacular leaps and sensitive interpretations, Nijinsky became a soloist at the Mariinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, in 1907, appearing in such classical ballets as Giselle, Swan Lake, and The Sleeping Beauty. In 1909 he joined Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and the company’s choreographer Michel Fokine created Le Spectre de la rose, Petrushka, Schéhérazade, and other ballets expressly for him.Yet his life dramatically demonstrates the uncertain line dividing genius and madness. The “god of dance” spent 30 of his 61 years in the grip of infantile rages and catatonic withdrawal; neither Freud, institutionalization, sedation nor countless insulin shock-treatments could halt his increasing derangement.

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SOURCES:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8184-0535-8 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/415147/Vaslav-Nijinsky