Susan E Becker

In collaboration with the Urbana Parks District, the Krannert Center for Performing Arts, and the Station Theatre, we presented BEAR (a six month, three part hibernation cycle), the fourth performance in The Unreliable Bestiary, a life-long project by Deke Weaver. During BEAR’s Fall Chapter Unreliable Bestiary Park Rangers lead small groups on silent walking tours of six stations (one for each month the bear is awake, each station built with recycled material) through Urbana, Illinois’ Meadowbrook Park.  Audience members crawled into a close, dark den for a final story at the end of each tour.  For BEAR’s Winter Chapter six videos, one for each month the bear is underground, were released online.

The Spring Chapter (February 2017) sat audiences at a huge table covered with cake, wine, and candles. Accompanied by live music and shadowplay, two intertwining tales were told: a human becoming a bear, and a bear becoming a human.

“Virago-Man Dem,” is an evening-length, dance-theatre work by Cynthia Oliver that navigates the complexities of black masculinities. Troubling the term “Virago”’s reference to characteristically male behaviors and female cultural transgressions, Virago-Man Dem is a nuanced study in masculinities, and their multiplicities within cultures of Caribbeanist and African American communities. The work utilizes movement, spoken word and visual design, to explore the expressions particular to Caribbean and African American black masculinities as they are performed and expressed by men, staged on male identified bodies, but designed and interpreted by a woman — Oliver. The work premiered in New York at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Next Wave Festival in October of 2017. All photos by Julieta Cervantes.

Sister re-embraces an idea first developed by Tere O’Connor in his work Four Sister Dances that premiered at The Kitchen in 1989.   “I tried to escape the omnipresence of theme and variation in dance by immersing myself in what I call ‘variation and variation.’  I looked to sisters as a metaphor for duplication, sameness, and difference. I was attempting to validate a different idea regarding ‘development’ in a dance, one that didn’t offer an anchoring point.“  In Sister, hyper-intricate rhythmic systems provide the chatter between the performers as they are propelled into an increasingly mysterious cascade of events.

For over a decade, choreographer Jennifer Monson focused her research on the migratory patterns of birds and whales in her project BIRD BRAIN. In 2002, she and three other dancers followed osprey along the coast of the eastern United States to Venezuela. More recently, Monson has returned to the theatrical stage as a soloist, proposing that dancing itself has the potential to archive ecological systems. In this program, Monson uses dance, video, and conversation to reveal the ways her research informs her dance making and how the animal migration patterns she observed continue to provide compositional and metaphorical inspiration for her performed improvisations.

Jennifer Monson’s Live Dancing Archive, originally premiered as an evening length solo work, and is one manifestation of many years of research. This iteration was re-imagined with two additional performers, Niall Jones and Tatyana Tenenbaum.

Sara Hook and Paul Matteson have an extraordinary duet, Bored House Guests, that tv writer/actress Lena Dunham might have applauded for its deadpan struggle with intimacy and communication. Embarrassingly awkward, timid, and/or frustrated, the duo are brilliant and brave, though relentless, in their exploration of all that is not expressed in a balletic pas de deux. This style is also infectious. Hook, who wears glasses throughout the dance, is that rarity in the dance world, a gifted comedian!

BOOM!, a new duet by Cynthia Oliver, features Oliver and Leslie Cuyjet as individuals, friends, strangers, family and younger/older versions of themselves, negotiating relations that are persistently in flux. Building upon a non-linear sequence of narratives around a life and a relationship—of a woman to herself, her history, her present and her future—BOOM! is a choreography of shifting realities. It is a looping, fractured unfolding, examining the notions of destiny, when life happens and when “fairness” and cause and effect do not necessarily align.

Jennifer Monson’s ongoing, modular dance performance project, in tow, foregrounds the experimental and addresses it as a category in constant flux, shaped by its political, economic and cultural contexts. Using creative processes spanning discipline, geography and generation, Monson and her collaborators have developed aesthetic, conceptual and procedural frameworks that aim to dislodge aesthetic positions and assumptions with regards to the experimental.

IN TOW
September 23–24 + September 29–October 1, 2016
8 pm (see below regarding pre-attacks)
Danspace Project
 

in tow is an ongoing performance research project bringing together 10 artists from 4 different decades, straddling location, discipline and aesthetic to create an evolving working process driven by what we each bring to “in tow.” The performance itself is a site for destabilizing what we are familiar with, testing new ground, defining difference and creating a shared practice that resonates with layers of experience, points of view and perspective. in tow is a collaborative project with Susan Becker, DD Dorvillier, Niall Jones, Alice MacDonald, Jennifer Monson, Valerie Oliveiro, Zeena Parkins, Angie Pittman, Nibia Pastrana Santiago. David Zambrano and Rose Kaczmarowski have also been a part of in tow, but will not be performing at Danspace Project.

Please note, every night of in tow is different. 

In September 2013, we're putting up WOLF, the third performance in my life-long project, The Unreliable Bestiary. After leaving Urbana-Champaign on a park-ranger-guided bus trip to Allerton (a forested park near the farm town Monticello, Illinois), the audience will be led over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house: a barn filled with video, dance, music, and stories that pull some of the threads together. WOLF will sink its teeth into the history, science and myth of this remarkable creature, while putting a domestic finger on the pulse of our uneasy relationship with the wild.

ELEPHANT – a live performance layering stop-motion animation, handheld video, monologs, dance, and music - is the second chapter in award-winning performer/playwright and media artist Deke Weaver’s life-long project, The Unreliable Bestiary: an ark of stories about animals, our relationships with them, and the worlds they inhabit. Inspired by the literary concept of the unreliable narrator and the medieval bestiary, which gave every living thing a spiritual purpose, the project will present an evening-length performance for each letter of the alphabet – the letter representing a particular endangered animal or habitat.

American Sinai began in 2009 as an investigation of how the artist, Kevin Hamilton, came to associate mountains – particularly the Rocky Mountains of Colorado – with the divine, and to thus to participate in a larger narrative of white conquest in the context of Christian pilgrimage. The project revolves around an investigation of Colorado’s Mount of the Holy Cross, a site that has swung between obscurity and fame over the centuries since white explorers first reported it as a confirmation of the right of whites to take the land. Kevin decided to visit the site in character, adopting the identity of a famous figure from American independent comics who has an unexpected tie to the place.

Inaction, laziness, or disinterest in work and reproduction, is often associated with people who do not perform adequately in captialistic terms; they are seen as under achievers, under educated, bums etc. This project uses the idea of inaction as articulated in the "The Right to be Lazy" written in the late 1800's by son-in-law of Karl Marx, Paul Lafarge. Lafargue identifies laziness as an antidote to excessive capitalist production. He saw work as a Christian moral, designed to keep people busy, and a bourgeois invention, designed to keep people hungry. 
Now, 125 years after "The Right to be Lazy", work is more valued than ever--to not work is to be either emasculated or excessive in economic terms. InAction is an suite of contestational furniture designed to facilitate public inaction. Participants use the units to host public conversations, contestational actions or for a comfortable, visible conversation. Interested parties can borrow/check out the InAction Units for groups of up to 20 (download the loan form). The units are packaged pillows, roll out blankets housed in a convenient backpack. Participants are provided with a guide of suggestions of how and where to practice inaction (i.e. centers of wealth accumulation, centers of marketed entertainment); the pillow devices help soften the hardened security scapes found at nearly all sites of capitalist management.
InAction suggests productivity in doing nothing.

An interpretation of the poem by Sharon Olds, choreographed by Jan Eckhart and performed by Sara Hook.