For information on the location and times of the performances please see the calendar page.

Paulina Colmenares

Violento Indigo (o la separación del átomo)

"...y que de tan claro despojo,
donde se va a anulando el mundo,
nace el delirio de ser uno,
en plena danza de ser otro."
-J Cortázar-

Destroying the limit that separates me from "the other", exploring differences and similitudes, separation and connectivity. Rejection and reconciliation.

Mamela Nyamza

Hatch

Hatch is a dance piece that seeks challenging issues of culture to convey, tradition and woman's evolving sexuality with and outside the customary rites and rituals of marriage, starting from the time a girl-child is born until she realises her true identity after years of hardship in a loveless marriage.

Taja Will

My Blood

"There I was, then I went, so here I am..."

This evolving solo explores my timeline and feelings around what I know as fact, and a yearning for the unknown. My solo is a narrative of an adopted woman through movement and sound.

Lourdes Roth & Miguel Angel Guzmán

...taken...

Duet in collaboration.

Rosario Romero Moreno

Artificios

...muted eyes that meet
in the opening of their wings...
The shadow of the air,
smoke has a body.
In the echo of the body,
is the music of tact.

Rosario Romero, David Carrillo, Moisés Regla y Francisco Morales develop an improv session for dance, cello, media and electronics. It is based on two forces: improvisation and interdiscipline. In an unpredictable and intuitive way, emotions, personalities and both languages are mixed to create one single piece, ephemeral, with the same fugacity with which days, people and emotion come into our lives and go away from them.

Katalin Lengyel

The Beginning of the Fiction of the Science

The solo has its own little myth that is actually a story about a machine, a small black box that has appeared in the world and caused a huge mess everywhere when it started to talk. Why? Because nobody likes to hear their deeply hidden opinions revealed by a machine that looks like an old kind of typewriter that nobody knows anymore, to people they would definitely not tell. Its voice came from the sky and the earth; you could hear it echoing from the walls and macadam roads, on the streets and at home: nobody could escape from it. No more secret thoughts in the world! And the black box was talking and talking in its monotonous feelingless way. People went out on the streets and protested against the state system, some established churches where they put enormous amount of money in the belief of protecting themselves -so much energy without any result. The solution came only after all of these actions had failed, and made finally place for people that seemed to know the answer for long-long time. Their motto was: We do not think, don't you do it either! -which practically speaks for itself. They found out that if the machine is able to tell everyone's thoughts, the only chance to avoid it is not thinking. And because we think in language, it should be absolutely expelled from the mind and body. Isn't it obvious! They did not stop at this point, oh no, one of their leader not-thinker also provided some methods for the folks to develop their own new understanding, communicating and interpreting system. In the future then nobody will remember anymore that there was a world where people used their mouth for talking. Good old language, adieu!

In my solo I did not go that far. I am still in the language system, but I already heard the machine talking and I am searching for solution by my own. I have several basic strategies against language thoughts based on my body possibilities. There are sections dealing with trance and monotony, such as breath and rhythm. And finally, everything is embedded in dance, the main method of all.

Kate Corby and Nora Stephens

Seedbank

Choreographers Kate Corby and Nora Stephens collaborate on a multi-city, site-specific installation in several garden spaces in the Americas. Investigating green concepts of sustainability and stewardship through improvisational movement structures and socio-political research, Seedbank explores our complex relationship with the natural world. Working through concepts of control, growth, destruction and the public versus the private, the duet offers multiple perspectives on a ubiquitous global issue. In a garden in Puebla, the performers weave, spiral and crawl through both the existing architecture of the garden and the shifting landscape of the audience's bodies in the inaugural performance of the project. The piece will eventually be performed at the World Dance Alliance - Americas General Assembly in Madison, WI in May 2009, and in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in late 2009.

*****

Santiago Turenne

Señal

Physical and not psychological beings are the inhabitants of Señal. Bodies that do not expect a result. The action is incomplete, fragmented and auto-cancelled within the form, opening up at the same time to multiple or no meaning(s). A form that reflects upon a form that reflects.

Martín Lanz

P.O. Cajita

Amanda Hamp

So Tech, So Savvy

This duet is culled from the group version of this piece, which experiments with relationships in the world of wires and wireless, themes of connection and attachment, and even displays of uninhibited love.

*****

Megan Harrold

vyvyv

Using the shape and volume of the body, a ritual is formed inside the lungs and body-fluids which transfers into visceral movements of the skeleton.

Kristin Heavey

The Mirror Has Six Billion Faces

The Mirror Has Six Billion Faces is inspired by the notion of "mirror neurons" - neurons that fire in the brain of an animal both when it performs an activity, and when it observes that activity being performed by another animal. The full import of mirror neurons is not currently understood, but they appear to be related to our capacity for imitation and for empathy. In the performance, two performers mirror and parody each others' activities, while a video projection interlaces segments of their bodies so that the boundary between one body and the other is obscured.

Chung-Fu Chang

Ash Wind

Ash Wind draws inspiration from music Alan Hovhaness's Visionary Landscape. The piece fuses a rich Chinese cultural heritage (poetic, ritualistic, theatrical and profoundly spiritual), and Western dance tradition that portrays life as a grain of sand that disappears in the wind traceless. This solo version of Ash Wind is dedicated to choreographer Chung-Fu Chang's auntie Wu Sholan who taught him to chant the Buddhist script when he was 8 years old in Taiwan. Ash Wind, originally in 4 sections, was commissioned by MOMETA Dance Company performed as a quartet in March 2006 in Chicago, performed by Adelphi University as a sextet in April 2006 in New York, and performed by Middle Tennessee State University in April 2007. The solo version is in 3 sections, it has been showcased at Colorado State University Spring Dance Concert 2006, Shelter Repertory Dance Theatre at Martha Rivers Ingram Center for the Performing Arts at Blair Ingram Hall in Nashville, TN; Aspen Dance Connection at the Wheeler Opera House, CO; and the South Regional ACDFA Faculty Concert at The University of Mississippi.

Christina Müllenmeister

Roundtrip

This piece is a Roundtrip through the diversity of a moving body, a moving ego and a moving soul. Searching for starting and ending points of personal desires for extremes. Experiencing the presence of unconscious insufficiency. So, what is the meaning, what do I want to share with moving my body around? It is about the sensual experience of seeing a contemporary dance piece.

Susan Rieger

Elusive Memory

The dance begins with a gesture downstage of someone forgetting their keys and evolves into a movement theatre piece where the memory loss becomes more and more severe, culminating with an Alzheimer's-like scenario of disorientation. This piece is a collaboration with visual artist Jen Holt, who designed porcelain funnels, washtubs and pails, which are used throughout by the dancers.

Cari Cunningham

41

"41" is a solo dance work based on a page from John Cage's journal. Premiered at the 2008 DUMBO Dance Festival, the movement and choreographic structure of this piece were derived using chance procedure, handwriting investigation, word association, and numeric equations. Central to the construction of the piece are Cage's omissions, the words crossed out because they did not fit the I-Ching determination of 41 words for this particular entry.

Kirsten Johansen

Just put it in the bag

A duet inspired by the travelling carnivals and sideshows of the early 20th century, just put it in the bag is a pseudo-fairytale of two castaways journeying through a dark and inhospitable world.

*****

Ixchel Méndez Salmón

Tantra/Garbha

This interdisciplinary choreographic piece recreates the origin of human life, the circle of life of a being that keeps itself in constant movement. It is seeing and listening through the first sounds of a humanity, breath, blood flow and the heart's beats, suffering a metamorphosis, discovering a light and a darkness; feeling, seeing and listening to the water, the sand, the wind and the fire. It is living the circle of life through artistic and sensory expressions that the human being has forgotten but nevertheless experiments within himself, as a reflection of the sensible being that is born, lives and dies.

*****

UDLA Danza

Ray Eliot Schwartz

Seres Inesperados

Ruben Ornelas

Volar

Zap McConnell

The Life-Blood of The Black Lamb

This piece is a many layered landscape of life and death and the beauty of that cycle within the pain of loss. Telescoping between the very personal and the state of the world, abstractions and archetypal symbols lead and allow the audience to experience their own story, hopefully.

Kathy Harty Gray

Battleground

This work portrays the hardship and heartbreak endured by women during wartime while waiting for the save return of their loved ones.

Compañía México en Movimiento

Border: una línea, dos mundos

Searching for a light beyond the border, the migrating man begins an adventure which is known to be difficult, that will take place in the shadows and that he will be vulnerable. An adventure filled with violence, sacrifice and a vulnerability that leaves him at the mercy of dream-breakers and life-breakers... all for the search of a light, the passport is just an open heart...

No to indifference, no to oblivion!

Laurie MacFarlane

Malawi Memory Dance

Malawi Memory Dance is a performance collage which uses movement, text, sound, costume and props to evoke the experience of a journey to south central Africa in 2006.

Miguel Ángel Zúñiga Solórzano

Trozos de piel

This piece is based on those impulses and sensations that are born on our skin; in those fortuitous encounters that look for a slight contact with another body, tumbling into other individuals and realizing that you're on your own.

Kathleen Byrne

Celestial Navigation

Contemporary pointe solo choreographed by Gerri Houlihan.

Kathleen Byrne

Untitled

Contemporary work by Jane Weiner.

Rosalía Loeza

Ligerezas

In the wind, slightly I feel.

Ligerezas is an encounter with love that lasted too long, and in a second, in only a sigh, it is buried without leaving a trace.

David Beadle & Allison Waddell

Threshold

Threshold is a study of light. This duet works with backlit doorways, dancing in the perimeters of expanding, spilling light. As light spills through a space, we look to ways to draw your bodies and consciousness into its expansiveness.

Carisa Armstrong, Christine Bergeron & Kathleen Byrne

Exceptional Jig

Rodanza / Lol-Beh Hernández & Erika Arévalo

De alas y espejismos

When spirit leaves the body because of pain, it is urgent to turn to consciousness to heal and bring it back... if not, that emptiness would be filled with senselessness, each time deeper and deeper, giving way to frivolity and to other monsters...

*****

Tania Solomonoff

Cholula Tierra del Fuego

Geographic landscapes as internal landscapes. A glacier from Tierra del Fuego is evoked in San Andrés Cholula's public plaza.

Gina T'ai

Gowned

An investigation of the formal and informal.

*****

Dahlia Nayar

Solo, Duet, Trio (Untitled)

The set Solo, Duet, Trio is a dedication to grandparents. They are all inspired by themes of aging and reflection. The solo is a meditative exploration of a raga (Indian music scale) using primarily gestures. The duet is an experiment of two people using vibration cues instead of sound/sight cues. The trio is a ritualistic meditative piece in honour of my grandfather who moved more slowly than anyone I ever knew.

*****

Lisa Parra

Object(s)

Object(s) looks at the triangle relationship between bodies, objects and space, specifically by examining the composition and interaction between the three variables in a particular environment. Through movement, sound, scenic and costume design, I explore the perception of objects and movement from two opposing settings: objects as a commodity and utility in every day life, and objects as a symbolic representation. During this process, I addressed the questions: How do objects acquire and lose meaning? How does this reflect on our ideas of the real and the imaginary, desire and fear? And, what kinds of things do we maintain, and what do we let go of?

Laura Silva Cervantes

Lo Blanco de lo Negro

Throughout time there has existed a fight between good and evil, the configuration of opposites. This brings us back to our interior where we fight against ourselves to rescue our good side. This confusion generates good things, the good side of evil.

Donna Costello

I want to feel

Jennifer Keller

Still Life Through Window

Jennifer Keller commissioned this solo from choreographer Jeanine Durning. Inspired by the solitary female figures in the paintings of Jan Vermeer, this work is the emotional journey of a woman in confinement; it is the externalization of her internal world.

Ruben T. Ornelas

Pith

Pith uses a simple structure of group and solo sections to evoke connection to the environment, each other, and passage of time.

Robert Bingham

/5/

This dance comes out of a formal investigation of the movement vocabulary of kalaripayettu, a South Indian martial art form. Specific features/qualities of the dance include strong, direct, and grounded movement, clear shaping and a propulsive athleticism, performed to a manically percussive recording by Brian Eno.

Sandra Lacy

Two by Eartha

Two by Eartha choreographed by former Trisha Brown company member Irene Hultman, is a luscious and playful solo for Sandra Lacy. The dance was inspired by the musical talents of Eartha Kitt and Irene's childhood recollections of Eartha's colorful and sultry performance persona.

Good Foot Dance Company

Foot by Foot

Short pieces featuring several kinds of percussive dance ranging from traditional and contemporary North American to vaudeville-inspired dance theater.

Cinthya Oyervides & Felipe Noriega

Herr Doktor

Encounters and dis-encounters of different characters guided by a tacit main character, where love is treated as the generator of pleasure or unpleasantness.

*****

Compañía FL Danse: Fabienne Lacheré & Miriam González

La ficción derrotada (de los hombres olvidados)

When a human being is unable to recognize himself, he turns into the predator of his own kind. There is nothing to be explained, you just have to sit and watch what happens around you.

Lou Sturm

Tocan Tierra

The landscapes of the body. The body as an infinite landscape of a rough and soft texture. Exploring the surroundings.

Doménica López Amezcua & Sergio Castro

Cyan [ estela de ti...]

Duet in collaboration.

What happens when the space of a musician and of a dancer is not defined? An exploration of the shared space and of the influence that one's own trail leaves within that space.

Mary Williford-Shade

In The Metal Garden

D. Chase Angier

Con Queso

A tongue in cheek trio inspired by the music of Herb Alpert.

Rachael L. Shaw

Pilgrimage

Based on The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, Pilgrimage chronicles the lives of three women and their very individual reactions to a singular experience. Utilizing movement that is both harmonious and disharmonious, Pilgrimage portrays the women's development from interdependence to anger and rebellion to forgiveness.

Nadine Martinez-Sierra

Now, Here!

Now, Here! was premiered in the BAAD ASS WOMEN Festival 2008 (NYC) curated by Arthur Aviles. Now, Here! explores and celebrates the female sensuality movement. This theme is explored with the music Ballad by Chucho Valdéz.

Francisco Carrera / Arte escénico ELEUSIS

Nosotros: Acqua

We are what we are, we keep each other company, we take care of each other, we provoke each other and we also remember each other when one of us leaves. We expand as liquid, we are identified as liquid, we recognize ourselves as life fluids, as water inside and out, as an immense sea that moves us. Today, once more, as water we live and die.

Julie Rothschild & Shawn Copeland

For This Time

Zen Monkey Project

Katharine Birdsall, Julie Rothschild, & Allison Waddell

TRIbeca

Allison Waddell & Zap McConnell

I often imagine myself...

Katharine Birdsall & Diego Martínez Lanz

Music and Movement Improvisation

Jennifer Tweel Kelly & Zap McConnell

In site

Julie Rothschild & Zap McConnell

In side

Allison Waddell & Zap McConnell

Out doors

****

Maida Withers Dance Construction Company

Fare Well - The End of the World As We Know It or Dancing Your Way to Paradise!

Fare Well is a multimedia work that brings insight and vibrant critique to the contemporary issue of "end time" through movement, music, text, and visual installation. Fare Well is as extreme in its moods and absurdities as we might think of "extreme weather." We watch hypnotized, immobilized, arrogant, innocent, and powerful - as the fires rage, volcanoes erupt, the Arctic melts, and the seas rise. "Did we do it?" - Going to extremes, the audience is brought in through humor and exaggeration. Fare Well has strong affinity with the genres of dance and performance art. Fare Well bears the unique stamp of Withers' works - the audience experiences the intensity and raw physicality of Withers as a demanding and dramatic performer with Steve Hilmy's real-time interactive electronics, his experimentalism and post-apocalyptic noisemaking. Fare Well takes place in a visual installation of images created by created by Ayodamola Okunseinde, multimedia artist, and projected into the performance space.

Jane Hawley

Lover/Magician (two of the four primordial masculine archetypes in gender aschematic form)

Lover/Magician is an excerpt from the evening length performance entitled, REIGN, The Masculine in Politics: four primordial archetypes campaign for decent leadership, which became a gender aschematic approach examining the masculine in politics/leadership. World premiere: November 2008, Jewel Theatre, Center for the Arts, Luther College, Decorah, Iowa USA.

Amira Ramírez

Urbanos

Interdisciplinary piece that combines dance, media and plastic & visual arts.

Heather Maloney

a particle of sand

Keira Hart-Mendoza

Tale of Three Twisted Sisters

Kent De Spain & Sally Doughty

Utmaia

Utmaia is a long-distance collaborative improvisation between Sally Doughty (United Kingdom) and Kent De Spain (United States). It examines the relationship between stillness and action, particularly how both have a kind of momentum and can act as a strange attractor within chaotic spaces.

Elena Giannotti

Silent Song, not decaying in the other world

The piece is part of a series of dances that have to be seen as a Compilation of Visual Songs. The themes for these songs are developed from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. A definite version of the Book of the Dead doesn't exist; it is rather a compilation of funerary texts and sacred hymns. For the structure of the piece, I considered how the written hymns progress and I have been working through a sense of poetry and spaceless. Knowing that the original pronunciation of the Hieroglyphs is lost, I imagined in the silent songs a way to translate my personal interpretation of Egyptian mythology into dance.

colectivo t o m a t e

B y C... El Intervalo

B y C is born from a play written by Mauricio Heredia (from colectivo t o m a t e) called El Intervalo, in which B and C are the main characters. During the interval, they both have monologues and there is a section where their lives intertwine. In the dance piece there is a movement investigation that departs from the relations between B and C, having always as main concept the term "fitting in". One body fits in another in different points and moments, accompanied by a text that describes a vocabulary of assembly (like the one we encounter in the booklet of some object to be assembled); these movements coincide, sometimes, with what happens on stage.

Jose Zamora

CholoRock

Excerpts: Malandrines, Mascara Contra Cabellera, Las Lloronas, Callejón de los Muertos. This work consists of four individual vignettes. The movement vocabulary is influenced by American hip-hop, Baile de Calabaciaos from Baja California; La Iguana from Michoacán; and post-modern technique. The themes of the choreographies are based on Mexican folk tales, Mexican Cinema from the 1960s and 1970s and the celebration of Death in Mexican culture.

Press Release: Inspired by Mexican-American culture and the work of film director Pedro Almodóvar, this Jacob K. Javits award-winning choreographer Jose Zamora, creates the town of CholoRock, a series of contemporary dance works. Surrounded by vibrant colors, high energy movement sequences and exhilarating, culturally based music, the inhabitants of the town share the stories of their lives.

Compañía Complejo Cultural Universitario

TBA

Tim Rehborg

Train2

On a steam train journey that defies physical parameters, two dancers find themselves making parallel decisions about where to look out the window, at which stop to exit the train, and where to burst through the closed door and jump off into the world outside. Simultaneously metaphorical and carnal, this dance is a journey through the decisions made in life, the passivity and assertion we have the freedom to possess.

Anadel Lynton

¿Quién soy yo? ¿Tú quién eres?

Who are the one's that are "my own" and who are "the others"? These are questions that are constantly confronted in nowadays' society, where migrations and intercultural communication are both endemic.

*****

María José Pérez-Castro

Cihuayo

Ritual dance that honors cycles, cartography and memories of the Earth's body and of women's. Playful celebration devoted to fertility that invites spectators to make the ritual their own, with their corporality and word. A recognition of solar and lunar cycles in the body. A silent and pleasant oracle, profound wisdom, lunar knowledge. The dance takes place in unconventional spaces and is modified according to the time of year. Cihuayo in Performática coincides with the celebration of Spring, when Nature finds itself in its highest point and the equilibrium between night and day takes place. Body movement is experimented as an alchemic process that turns fear of death into joy of life and into a recognition/acceptance of the birth-growth-decadence-death cycle. Menstruation, blood river, voice of moon... blood, blood, blood, birth, pulsating life, growing seed.

Ladys González

Video instalación frontera danza

This piece's proposal is to inhabit the word "frontier" as a defined space, a no-place. It departs from the relationship between artistic languages and explores their limits (frontiers) as instances of permanence and hybrid. The bridges (in their physical and metaphorical sense), the transit, the pass of time and the celebration of dance are all part of the image composition. Artists from countries such as Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, Mexico and Bolivia (currently residing in Argentina) we called upon for this piece.

agnieszka&agnieszka

Things we can still do on stage

A dramaturgical construction of the performance will be based on the script of an adventure story. The form of the performance will be inspired by a musical show structure, mixed with slapstick comedy, horror film and dance video clips aesthetics. Within this frame we want to play with caricature, artificiality, superficiality, sentimentality, kitsch, (things which are "forbidden" in the contemporary performance world) and to present them as a chaotic world of children's imagination. How will they alternate in it, gain new meanings? How child performers can change our way of perceiving them?

The idea is to give each child a possibility to interpret and embody the main character, a "superhero without a cause". He will be in some way an anti-hero, struggling with his destiny and confusion. The hero will have many faces, as many as children performers on the stage. There won't be any set character for any of them. Kids will smoothly go through different physicality, characters, heroes, styles so that each of them can experience and recreate the special and one of a kind appearance.

*****

Makeda Thomas

FreshWater

FreshWater takes its title from the Trinidadian term for someone who talks, dresses or acts American without having gone overseas (crossing salt water). The term also serves to remind someone who may have indeed gone overseas that they are still Caribbean. Fresh Water is being created in the midst of returning home to Trinidad after 20 years living abroad. It is, therefore, a deeply personal work - set in the stage of a mystical, multilayered culture of compelling depth of breadth and scope. Fresh Water is a dance between Memory and Reality. It is a work about family, legacy and continuity; tradition and heritage; about the fragility of life and the fragility of culture.

The everyday reality of Trinidad is a cultural stream that fuses myth and fact, reason and irrationality, dream and vigil. I recall these rhythms, shapes, forms and symbols. I recall them in dance and music, which represents a vibrant, living institution for the study of the Amerindian-African-European-East Indian historical and cultural impact. I recall them in the performance art of mas, the defining aspect of Trinidad's Carnival. I recall them in the folklore, song, vernacular, and chanted, improvised dialogue; in the sounds and gestures rooted and gleaned in daily life in Trinidad. Fresh Water transforms these original sources and convokes a whole new universe out of fragments of it and my own personal life. This imbues the work with a physical vitality and conceptual sensuality unique to Trinidad & Tobago, and demonstrates why 'fresh water' is also the one resource we all need to survive.

Penny Arcade

TBA

Gilad Ben Ari

Them

The piece deals with two main issues in regard to the reality of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.

The first issue is the mechanisms of separation that exists within the Israeli society, and between the two societies, not necessarily by direct means of the state. The way we are able to live next to each other, yet, manage/chose to encapsulate our reality to the limited relevant surrounding for our needs. There is no one conception of the reality that as such it's problems can be addressed and solved, but there are multiple conceptions that do not coincide. The piece tries to ask how can we deal with the problems of the region, when we don't even agree on what are those problems, and what is the reality in which we live.

The second issue that the piece deals with is the movement restrictions inside the occupied Palestinian territories; restrictions enforced by Israel in order to regulate the movement of Palestinians from one city to another within the bounds of the occupied territories, and not between the territories and Israel.

This subject is the base for the movement vocabulary of the piece. This issue is addressed as one of the aspects of what the mechanisms of the separation can enable.

Alex Escalante

sylababel

An exploration into the varied effects of oratorial language and how the power of the spoken and written word drive a collective psysche. From atop a sculpturally rigged ladder, Escalante plays with text, sound and live video. sylababel, like much of Escalante's work, is political in nature and draws from events both current and past.

Ami Garmon

Take me home with you

Why do we go anyway?

To get to the other side.

The work builds a landscape of words, emotions, and move- ments-- Choreography as anact of nostalgia re-membering, piecing all these elements together like clues and body parts, mapping a land betweenmeaning and meaninglessness. Issued from a period of three years of writing and exploring indolence and grief, these miniature stories and reflections compose a collection presented here as a performance between song, dance, speaking laughter and emotion.