Culturemart 2014

LEIMAY: XIMENA GARNICA + SHIGE MORIYA – Frantic Beauty

Frantic Beauty unfurls the pursuit of beauty, revealing its inherent ambivalence through a performance juxtaposing sound, video, light, movement and kinetic sculptures. Spawned by imagination, beauty shapes society based on our dreams and desires. At the same time, this beauty is capable of sabotaging humanity. Frantic Beauty examines how the power of the beauty we choose to pursue determines our future.

A HARP Alum Presentation.

MICHAEL BODEL – there are caves and attics

“To tell the truth, my body will not be so easily reduced. It has, afterall, its own phantasmagoric resources. It possesses some placeless places — places more profound and more obstinate than the soul . . . It has its caves and attic.”

Emerging from Michel Foucault’s 1966 radio broadcast Corps Utopique, this is a solo in 6 parts, danced alongside text and an original olfactory score.

A HARP Alum Presentation

LEYNA MARIKA PAPACH – Glass Mouth (Part 2)

Glass Mouth (Part 2) is about the complexity of our identity. All the layers of identity we carry within us, and all that reverberates in time and space through the words we speak and the movements we make. Featuring performers Saori Tsukada,  Mariko Endo, Christia Dautresme, and working with visual artists, Jerry Smith Jr.,Leyna Marika Papach creates a opera/movement-theater work where sound, music, dance, and chance are woven together in a story of characters lost in a labyrinth of unresolved thoughts, wishes, and regrets.

YVAN GREENBERG & LABORATORY THEATER – GENET PORNO

GENET PORNO is based on Jean Genet’s 1943 novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, and follows the loves and betrayals of a cross-dressing gay prostitute named Divine. Divine’s story is staged within the production of a present-day gay porn video, incorporating narrative elements from the confessional videoblog of a real-life porn star. Their stories merge in an “impossible ballet” as GENET PORNO explores our contemporary culture of narcissism and the consequences that result from blurring our public and private lives.

LAURA PETERSON CHOREOGRAPHY – The Futurist

How far away is the future? What happens to your body when you think about the future? What will happen to us? The Futurist is an evening-length dance by Laura Peterson Choreography with sound installation by composer Joe Diebes where moving sound sources and speakers transform into costumes, furniture, or landscapes, and complex choreography physicalizes states of dread, hope, anticipation, and excitement of imagined possible futures. Drawn from interviews with diverse groups of participants, The Futurist explores the questions we ask about the future. Performed by Kate Martel, Michael Ingle, Jennifer Sydor, and Laura Peterson.

A HARP Alum Presentation

MEI-YIN NG & MEI-BE WHATEVER – Lost Property Unit

In Lost Property Unit, dance explorer Mei-Yin Ng opens an investigation into the bodily and soul-driven limits of surveillance, networking, and media. Dance, robotic sculpture, and a time bending blend of live and recorded video craft a chilling narrative of a beautiful recluse and the cyborg pet who is anything but her best friend. Lost Property Unit lures us into a head space where solitude is never total and togetherness is always just out of reach.

SOOMI KIM & MEI-YIN NG – Chang(e)

Chang(e) is based on the life and work of Philadelphia-based Asian American performance artist and activist Kathy Change. She is infamously remembered for her last “performance” in which she set herself on fire and danced in protest to the political apathy of elite students of UPenn. Soomi Kim portrays the enigmatic and controversial Change in this dynamic new hybrid dance theatre work. Chang(e) incorporates dance on film, site-specific work, political theatre, movement, video, and original music. This marks Kim’s 3rd collaboration with director Suzi Takahashi.

STEFAN WEISMAN & DAVID COTE – The Scarlet Ibis

When Doodle was born, no one expected him to live. But he did. Now his older brother has to lug him everywhere in a red wagon. One summer day, a scarlet ibis appears in the bleeding tree behind the family house. The boys’ fates are intertwined with this exotic creature. Based on the classic 1960 story by James Hurst, The Scarlet Ibis is a multimedia opera that explores the pain and wonder of childhood.

This is a concert of the complete piano and vocal score only.

For adults and teens.

JOSEPH SILOVSKY – Send for the Million Men

Send for the Million Men examines the controversial executions of Sacco and Vanzetti. Their case was the Cause Célèbre of the 1920s and still enflames passionate responses from advocates and detractors alike. In collaboration with Victor Morales (video designer/performer) and Catherine McRae (sound), and working in his unique style of oratory, robotics and puppetry, Silovsky illuminates the humor and tragedy in the story and connects it to today’s political strife as well as his own micro-tragic biography.

REBECCA DAVIS – Restless Next

Restless Next is an evening-length performance that underscores the body’s ceaseless mutability. Four performers render the familiar strange as they pass with dream-like logic from basic pedestrian movement to highly abstracted forms.

HAI-TING CHINN – Science Fair

Science Fair is an opera-singer’s love-song to the scientific worldview. Conceived and performed by mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn, and featuring pianist Mila Henry, Science Fair melds Science and Opera into a witty evening of songs, slides, and live experiments.

The words of working scientists, writers, and teachers are set to music by contemporary composers and become songs about the phases of the moon, the evolution of whales, the physics of the operatic voice, and, above all, the wonder of the scientific worldview.

MATT MARKS & PAUL PEERS – Mata Hari

An interdisciplinary opera-theatre piece, Mata Hari is inspired by the life of Margaretha Geertruida Zelle a.k.a. Mata Hari, the mystic dancer who was executed for espionage during World War I. The story is placed during the last months of her life while incarcerated in Paris’ notorious Saint Lazare prison. It centers on her fight to live and the five men that led to her death.

BORA YOON – Sunken Cathedral

Designed as an architectural journey through a house, and an archetypal journey through the subconscious, Sunken Cathedral is a multimedia musical performance work by Korean American composer, vocalist, and sonic surrealist Bora Yoon. Each room illuminates a different sonic ‘space’, which excavates memory, insights, and intersections in which our greatest diamonds and demons are held. With video projection design by Adam Larsen and directed by Glynis Rigsby, Sunken Cathedral traces death, life, rebirth, and the cyclical death, the alchemical moment of transmutation where one medium becomes another.