Colony Theatre. Jan 21, 2012. 8:30 p.m.
Tool Is Loot is a collaborative creation by choreographers Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey with composer Jonathan Bepler. It is the culmination of a year-long process of aesthetic disorientation.
In the last 10 years, Wally Cardona has created projects of every scale, in a wide range of venues/festivals in the U.S. and abroad, including BAM/Next Wave, PICA’s TBA Festival, Helena Presents, International Festival of Arts & Ideas, the Cannes Festival and Dance Umbrella/London.
Jennifer Lacey, based in Paris since 2000, has continually questioned the form a “dance” can take on. She has founded a number of highly regarded projects with “ambiguous borders”: Projet Bonbonniere, a research and living project designed to rehabilitate Italianate theatres; Prodwhee, a disposable series of performances using the dance residency as currency; and Robinhood, a mythic and invisible performance with artist Cerith Wyn Evans. Her extensive work with visual artist Nadia Lauro has been commissioned by many large-scale festivals (Lyon, Montpellier, Kyoto, Vienna).
To create Tool Is Loot, Cardona and Lacey first worked apart, in the U.S. and France respectively, for one year. In each project they created an “empty solo,” designed to make itself completely available to an outside eye or opinion. Each artist then solicited weeklong encounters with individuals with skill sets far outside of dance: an astrophysicist, a sommelier, an architect, a film editor, a medical supply salesman, a kinetic sculptor, a baroque opera singer, an art critic, an acoustician and a social activist.
Now, as the two choreographers come together in Tool Is Loot, the identity of each artist is simultaneously undone and strengthened in a duet that carries the ghosts of aesthetic positions that are not their own. The opinions and interpretations of composer Jonathan Bepler, via his original musical score, and lighting designer Thomas Dunn, via his original design, function as yet further clarification and re-interpretation of Tool Is Loot.
“We would like to believe that our bodies and our brains are fantastically flexible and responsive to change, containing – at any moment – both the abstract and the specific. Well… what we’ve learned is that this is both gloriously true and frustratingly untrue. But that’s okay, really, and this dance proves it. There will be a swan, a prince, a robot, sexual behavior and two chairs. Sometimes all at once.”
A discussion will take place immediately following the concert.
Workshop and Panel Discussion
The title of both the Workshop and the Panel is Delightful Disorientation, a phrase that aptly describes Tool Is Loot.
Workshop: In relation to Tool Is Loot, Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey will share some games where meaning, intent and form can shift to create multiple interpretations of a dance.
Panel: With Wally Cardona, Jennifer Lacey, Lisa Beal and Alain Filiz. The panel will discuss Tool Is Loot, its themes and creation process. The panel will be moderated by Helena Thevenot, series facilitator for Nomad Dance Dialogues. Lisa Beal and Alain Filiz were selected as “non-dance” participants in the spirit of the creation process of the Miami performance of Tool Is Loot. Dr. Lisa Beal is Associate Professor of Physical Oceanography at UM’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. Floral designer Alain Filiz is the owner of Black Eyed Susans.
Tigertail Productions at the Colony Theatre
1040 Lincoln Road
Miami Beach, FL 33139
305.324.4337
www.tigertail.org
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