“The setting is a game show competition and it appeals to me because . . . [I can] manipulate its elements to say something different about the cosmetic and destructive nature of competition in our culture.”—Melanie Stewart, Director of Kill Me NowYou’ve seen Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance, now get ready for the newest dance-competition-reality-show-craze Kill Me Now. On this program, the contestants’ lust for fame is weighed against their will to live. Audience participation rules the night as dancers alternate between contestant and judge while trying to win your hearts—all under the whip of an MC who some might call a dominatrix.

A fast-paced, comic, immersive experience, Kill Me Now morphs from the familiar into a ruthless examination of the performers’ personas, stripping apart their desire for an ultimate prize, and what they are willing to do to get it. Under the direction of Melanie Stewart, the raucous dance crew is led by Bethany Formica, Janet Pilla, Les Rivera, Megan Mazarick, Karl Schappell, and Scott McPheeters. Hosting duties are performed by Catherine Gillard, co-artistic director of the Scottish-based visual theater company, benchtours. The text is written by OBIE Award winner John Clancy of Clancy Productions.

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Chunky Move’s highly acclaimed, cutting-edge fusion of technology and dance is on full display in Mortal Engine. This intensely physical, sensual, and visually daring work uses movement- and sound-responsive projections that morph human figures into light and sound and back again. Mortal Engine has no pre-rendered video, light, or laser images. Instead, interactive systems allow light, video, sound, and body movement to respond to each other in real time. With this groundbreaking visual power, Mortal Engine leads us into a world where unformed bodies search to connect and evolve. Trapped in a constant state of becoming, these bodies veer between moments of exquisite cosmological perfection and grotesque evolutionary accidents of existence.“One body became two, two became one. A large moving blob of amoeba-like creatures swallowed up everything in its path. Laser displays diminished the dancers, then magnified them. Giant tangles of spiders’ webs were created, and exploding snowflakes, and splintering abstract shapes.” –EIF Critic Bridget Stevens

Click here to watch a preview video

Click here for a full photo gallery and to read reviews from Mortal Engine’s hit run at the 2008 Edinburgh International Festival

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“Philly is dirty. I like that.”—Kate Watson-Wallace, Director of STOREThe store is our shared space, our public square, our theater.

Chronicling the inner life of the American consumer and performed inside in an abandoned mega-store, STORE is inspired by how and why we buy. It identifies the rules that we live by as shoppers, and relocates them. It imagines what our world would be like if we only had the rules left, and everything else was gone, except for the leftovers, the wreckage of our excess. What will our bodies do in this world where our needs—detest, discover, purchase, apply, empty, repeat—can no longer be met?

Part performance art, part dance party, part absurdist infomercial, STORE is the third work in American Spaces (HOUSE, 2006; CAR, 2008), a trilogy of site-based performance installations. Video artist Ricardo Rivera, composer Josh Cicetti, dramaturge Sebastienne Mundheim, and costume designer Millie Hiibel round out the creative team, along with performers Makoto Hirano, Jaamil Kosoko, John Luna, Lorin Lyle, Heather Murphy, and Kate Watson-Wallace.

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“How can we be sane when we are destroying that which we need to survive?” — Myra Bazell and Madison Cario, directors of TIDETIDE brings in the living and the dead and takes out the same.

SCRAP Performance Group celebrates its 15 year anniversary with a new TIDE. An ever-evolving work of experimental dance theater, TIDE investigates the disconnection between humans and the natural world, and the damage this has done to our everyday lives. As audiences navigate sand, dirt, bamboo walkways, a wall of discarded CDs, and a net of twist ties, TIDE asks, what pieces of our “civilized” past do we hold onto to survive?

TIDE is driven by the intensely personal, and is not a sermon. Known for their humor and blazing physicality, married co-artistic directors Myra Bazell and Madison Cario use their relationship, their inherited values, and the life experiences of SCRAP’s dancers as ingredients for their artistic explorations. Sets, lighting, and sound design are created alongside the choreography, inseparably melding technical elements with dance. TIDE promises a visually exquisite, psychologically intricate, and emotionally raw vision of our shared experience.

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The A.W.A.R.D. Show! 2009: Philadelphia

Artists With Audiences Responding to Dance“I really don’t believe that art should be rarefied. It should be as simple as breathing air.” — Neta Pulvermacher, founder of The A.W.A.R.D. Show!, in an interview with Time Out New York.

12 choreographers. $10,000. Who takes it home? You be the judge.

Here’s a show that doesn’t just talk the artistic talk, but backs it up with what an artist craves most—money! Twelve Philadelphia-area choreographers, chosen for their ability to create inspirational and inventive contemporary dance, compete over three preliminary performances. Each night features the work of four choreographers, and audiences vote one winner per night into the final competition. On the fourth and final night, the three final choreographers present their work, and the winner takes home the $10,000. (The two runners-up each receive $1,000.)

More than a gladiatorial dance-off, The A.W.A.R.D. Show! provides post-show discussions for audiences to express their ideas about the work directly to the choreographers. By having the audience choose what’s best, The A.W.A.R.D. Show! entices you to pay close attention to the dance that’s presented. And while not every choreographer goes home with Benjamins, the show provides a platform for emerging artists to present their work to a large audience, and for audiences to be exposed to the next wave of American choreography.

The A.W.A.R.D. Show! 2009 is administered by The Joyce Theater Foundation (www.joyce.org) and also has competitions in New York City (Joyce SoHo), Chicago (The Dance Center of Columbia College), and Seattle (On the Boards). The A.W.A.R.D. Show! was founded by Neta Pulvermacher, artistic director of The Neta Dance Company. The A.W.A.R.D. Show! 2009 productions and awards in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Seattle are made possible by a generous grant from The Boeing Company.

PHILADELPHIA
September 15-17 and 19

Selected choreographers: Nichole Canuso, Braham Logan Crane, Devynn Emory, Kirsten Kaschock, Megan Mazarick, Jen McGinn, Jumatatu Poe, Gabrielle Revlock, Jenn Rose, Zornitsa Stoyanova, Kathryn TeBordo, Kate Watson-Wallace.

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A new work by Merián Soto (States of Gravity & Light #2, 2007)

“I want to bring the outside inside.”—Merián SotoAt award-winning choreographer Merián Soto’s 2009 Live Arts Festival offering, the audience enters a space of reverie as performers dance with branches, some as long as 25 feet. Video projections of nature in extreme close-up—snowstorms, wind-blown leaves, moving water—are magnified on the walls, the dancers, the branches, and the audience. Amid a trance-inducing soundscape, dancers ever-so-slowly shift their bodies to accommodate the shifting balance of the massive branches. The audience is invited to walk around the performance and experience it as an unfolding installation.

The dance is a quest to move into stillness. Each movement creates fantastical shadows that provide an alternate framework to the abstract images of the natural world. Size and perspective morph in relation to shadow and light, and like a hall of mirrors, everything becomes reflective. A sense a danger enshrouds the room, as the precarious symmetry of dancer and branch—despite their gentle beauty—is forever on the precipice of destruction. Soto’s new work is a part of her States of Gravity & Light series that has included the Wissahickon Park Project, which featured outdoor performances throughout the park, and States of Gravity & Light, Vol. 2, which she presented at the 2007 Live Arts Festival. Dancers include Shavon Norris, Jumatatu Poe, and Olive Prince.

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“The piece makes visible (and audible) the constant, invisible, absurd maintenance of the body.” – Andrew Simonet, co-artistic director of Headlong Dance TheaterTo feel your best, eat steel-cut oats with almonds and rice milk in the morning. Change your underwear twice a day. Smoke marijuana on the first day of your period (clear this with your employers if you have to work that day). Take a multi-vitamin. Definitely don’t drink as much tequila as you want to. And watch Headlong’s Live Arts performance.

Headlong Dance Theater has thrown their creative process upside down, going from 16 years of total collaboration to artistic directors Amy Smith, Andrew Simonet, and David Brick choreographing in secret from one another, often egging their dancers to give away secrets of their colleagues’ work. Whether kissing dolls, learning to parachute, or becoming a flock of birds, nothing is deemed impossible in this daring new show that features Nichole Canuso, Niki Cousineau, Devynn Emory, Jaamil Kosoko, Kate Watson-Wallace, and Christina Zani.