SEEKERS
a mediated performance
Zack Fuller (L) photo by Tiik Pollet, Asimina Chremos
Sat. April 30th at 5pm
Atlantic Wharf Waterfront Square
290 Congress Street, Boston, MA
FREE & Open to the public
Addressing themes of intimacy, communication, and relationship where distance is the premise, Seekers is a bicoastal dance improvisation experiment that looks at how modern day communications have redefined the search for connection. It considers to what degree an online profile is able to capture the complexity of an individual's unique set of experiences - can you really get to know someone online? These questions and themes are accessed through dance, lived and expressed through the body, by a unique cast of eight movement artists. Uniting two casts from LA and Boston who have never met, the project has two parts: (1) the filming of movement portraits of four performers in a studio in LA and (2) a live broadcast of that footage onto monitors in the Atlantic Wharf Waterfront Square where a second cast meets them.
The internet, as a communication and networking resource, has created new formats for self-representation (the online profile) and ways to forge connection while transcending place, opening the possibility for dialogue where it never existed. It has also created new forms of intimacy. Seekers considers the implications of relationships based on absence, when our deep desires for meaning, understanding, and love persist. It calls attention to our imagination and its role in constructing encounters.
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Concept & Direction – Alissa Cardone & Alla Kovgan
Performers - Olivier Besson, Heyward Bracey, Alissa Cardone, Asimina Chremos, Maria Gillespie, Michel Kouakou, Allison Wyper and Zack Fuller
Director of Photography - Mko Malkhasyan
Production Assistants – Lindsay Warner, Ian Isles, Jeff Cleary, Dedalus Wainwright
Art Direction – Dedalus Wainwright
Technical Director - Anne Dresbach
Volunteers - Dan Hermes, Richard Johnson and Cyberarts staff
Music Credits – Tears by Shamou, O Superman by Laurie Anderson, Tico Tico Cha Cha by Ruben Calzado, Radar Love by Golden Earring, “Ma-Ma” FC by Ballake Sissoko & Vincent Segal, Wayfaring Stranger by Neko Case, Islands by the XX, Rudie Can’t Fail by the Clash, Alcoba Az by Lila Downs, At Last by Etta James, Blue Danube Waltz on 101 Strings Orchestra, Message in a Bottle by the Police, I Put a Spell on You by Screaming Jay Hawkins, The Clandestine Adventures Of Ms. Merz by Tin Hat Trio, Dance Me to the End of Love by Leonard Cohen
About the Performers -
Olivier Besson is Sitting on a rock surrounded by water, while holding on with fear.
Heyward Bracey is I like to explore the edges of control and lack of control, balance and falling down, meaning and chaos.
Alissa Cardone is A dream I had where the gate in the backyard opens, and the vines on the trees strap my legs and pull me into the forest.
Asimina Chremos is A sense of deep listening, as though I am waiting to be struck by inaudible sound.
Zack Fuller is A worm-eaten dog with beautiful purple wings trying desperately to smash his way out of a diamond studded tower of shit. I used to stutter because my thoughts moved too fast to come out through my mouth.
Maria Gillespie is transported, precise, committed, fixated, decisive, turbulent. Merging with space, juxtaposing against space, gravity, the fun of opposing gravity, becoming memories, swallowing dreams.
Michel Kouakou is I don’t like being a character. I would impersonate myself, myself is known to me. Trying to incarnate other characters would be stepping into the unknown.
Allison Wyper is Running down the hill I fell on the gravel road and cut myself right in the third eye.
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Olivier Besson is an improviser/choreographer who hails from France and is based in Boston. In the period from 1980 until the mid 90's, Olivier studied Contact Improvisation with Robin Feld, Nancy Stark Smith, Lisa Nelson and Andrew Harwood, and Improvisation / Real Time composition with Julyen Hamilton. During that time, he also practiced and performed Bugaku (Court dance from Japan) with Arawana Hayashi. Most notably, Olivier’s work has been presented at the National Institute of the Arts (Taipei, Taiwan), Die Pratze (Tokyo), Art of Movement Festival (Yaroslav, Russia), Micadanses (Paris), Dance Theatre Workshop (NYC), New York Improvisation festival, Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis), Boston Dance Umbrella, Florida Dance Festival, and the Dance Place (Washington DC). Olivier is currently on faculty at The Boston Conservatory. He has been on faculty at the French National Circus School (CNAC), the Bates Dance Festival, Emerson College and the School of Fine Arts at Boston University.
Heyward Bracey - a Butoh influenced dancer/choreographer artist - performed for five years as a member of Los Angeles’ notoriously subversive Corpus Delicti, a Butoh/performance art troupe known for its daring explorations of social and political issues as well as its psychologically alarming aesthetic. His performances and actions with Corpus Delicti have ranged in venue from Santa Monica's Highway's Performance Space and the Noh Space at Theater of Yugen in San Francisco, to the annual conference of the Association for Theater in Higher Education in Denver Colorado. Spring of 2009 he produced and performed in "Global Descent" at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica collaborating with internationally renowned Butoh Master Katsura Kan. He continued the collaboration, dancing in Katsura Kan's "Butoh Beckett Notations '09" performances at the Abrons Art Center in New York in May of 2009. He has also worked extensively with Los Angeles' Body Weather Laboratory. His recent works/collaborations include "Oracle and Enigma" - with Katsura Kan in August 2010 at Highways Performance Space, "Tale of Four Cities" Butoh festival - solo performance at the Wild Project in New York October 2010, and "Catalyst" produced by LA Movement Arts in December of 2010. He is co-founder of Descent Performance Laboratory.
Alissa Cardone has been making dances and performing in Boston, nationally and internationally since 1997. In 1999 she co-founded Kinodance Company, an intermedia performance collaborative creating stage performances, installations and films. She is currently completing her MFA at UCLA. (http://www.kinodance.org)
Asimina Chremos began her dance career at age 16 in the early 1980's as a corps and soloist dancer with the Pittsburgh Ballet Theater under Patricia Wilde. She later turned to modern dance and earned a BFA in Dance, summa cum laude from Temple University in 1991. Throughout the 2000's she was an active member of the Chicago creative community, during which time her practice developed to fully embrace improvisation in performance and she formed collaborations with vocalist Carol Genetti and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm among other musicians. Chremos has studied with many teachers in many styles of dance over the years, she counts Ishmael Houston-Jones, Simone Forti and Karen Nelson as influential teachers in improvisation; more recently, Mary Abrams in Continuum. In August 2010, Chremos developed lightspace/shadowplace, a performance for one person at a time, during a residency at Project Space Available in Seattle, WA. In December 2010, she returned to Philadelphia.
Zack Fuller played a caveman in his class play in kindergarten and has been performing ever since. He was front man for the DC post punk trash metal band Scythian in the mid-eighties and also recorded with Troubled Gardens. In 1987 he participated in theatrical research with Ryszard Cieslak of the Polish Laboratory Theater of Jerzy Grotowski, an experience that destroyed any possibility of his having a career as a professional actor. He has performed throughout Europe, Japan, and the U.S. in works by the renowned dancer/farmer Min Tanaka, including the U.S. tour of Poe Project: Stormy Membrane and the European tour of the Goya series. His own original dances have been presented by CAVE’s New York Butoh Festival, Plan B in Tokyo, and the Dance Hakushu Festival in Yamanashi, Japan. His current activities include cutting up trees with his chainsaw and dancing with his seven year old son Kai in the living rooms of the grandchildren of dead opera singers.
Maria Gillespie received her BFA in dance from SUNY Purchase in 1993 and began presenting her work in NYC at Movement Research, Dixon Place, and Gowanus Arts Exchange. Since relocated to Los Angeles in 1996, her dances have been presented in Los Angeles at venues including The Ford Amphitheater, The Getty Center, REDCAT, The Fowler Museum, CalArts, Highways, The Electric Lodge, CSU Long Beach, Scripps and Pomona College, Santa Monica College and in NYC's Joyce SoHo, San Francisco's CounterPULSE and Tokyo, Japan. Locally, she has worked and performed extensively with Victoria Marks, Helios Dance Theater, and additionally with David Rousseve, Joe Goode, and Holly Johnston. Recently, Gillespie has enjoyed collaborating with other artists; Allison Wyper, Doran George, Susan Josephs, Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, Da Xu, Robbie Shaw, Kristy Tully, Robert Cosentino and Bryan Koneitzko have been fruitful collaborative partnerships in addition to Oni Dance. Gillespie founded Oni Dance in 2005 and was named one of Dance Magazine's "25 to Watch". She is the honored recipient of choreographic grants from The Durfee Foundation and The James Irvine Foundation Grant. Her dance film, Saliendo, was selected for Dance Camera West’s Local Makers screening in 2006. An esteemed teacher of contemporary modern technique, she was adjunct professor at UCLA's Department of World Arts & Cultures from 2001-2008.
Allison Wyper makes live performance that destabilizes the familiar from a female, activist perspective to reveal uncomfortable truths about our everyday lives, bridging contemporary practices including performance art, theatre, dance and conceptual art. Allison has performed and collaborated with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Violeta Luna, Sara Shelton-Mann, Hancock & Kelly, Maria Gillespie, Michael Sakamoto, Katsura Kan, Guillermo Galindo (a.k.a. gal*in_DOG), Scrap & Salvage, Culture Clash, paige starling sorvillo/blindsight, and Pilgrim Theatre Research and Performance Collaborative. Her work has been seen in Los Angeles (at LACE, Highways Performance Space, Hammer Museum, Fowler Museum, UCLA, and Cal State Long Beach), San Francisco (at Dance Mission, Yerba Buena Gardens, NOHspace, The Garage, and CounterPULSE), Boston (at Boston Center for the Arts, the ICA, and Emerson College) and Berlin (at Schwelle7). She founded and directed San Francisco-based Black Stone Ensemble from 2005-2008. Allison holds a BA in Theatre Studies with concentrations in Directing and Visual Art from Emerson College. She is currently an MFA candidate in Dance at UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures. www.allisonwyper.com
