Bios:
Linda Austin
Jeff Forbes
1) Alembic
2) Modern Garage Movement
3) 10 Tiny Dances
4) Sixth Annual Richard Foreman mini-festival
5) Frozen Music II
Alembic
PWNW innaugurates a Sunday afternoon co-production series : Alembic
Coming July 13: Yulia Arakelyan, Kathryn Hightower, and Kim Kaplan
more information here
Modern Garage
Movement
"New Gree"
Workshop and performance
Modern Garage Movement will conduct a workshop at PWNW
Workshop: Saturday July 12 / 12-4 pm
Cost: $20.00
Registration can be made by e-mail: moderngaragemovement@gmail.com
Performance: July 13, 8 pm, @ Valentine's
232 SW Ankeny, Portland OR
New Gree is a dance on tour that not only happens anywhere, but is happening
all the time. The fashions worn on the road are the costumes of the dance.
The terrain of the performance is demarcated by props; jibs, tarps, flags,
lights, mirrors and projections. MGM's rock band concept is transformed
into a band of cow-boygirls and the New Gree group is always on guard,
ready for long stillnesses, quick getaways, telepathy and remonstrance.
An aim, but not goal of New Gree, is to dance in complete unison with
eyes closed, navigating safely through densities of people and space.
Ulteriorly, the choreography works with shifting formations of energy
and hyper-reality in relation to the mobile audience, building additive
layers of past and future performances, past and future influences, and
linking everyone and everything in the accumulative journey of now.
New Gree of MGM Class Description:
Title: Dancing everywhere and all the time.
This class, taught jointly by Felicia Ballos, Biba Bell and Jmy Leary seeks to prepare an articulate, alert and non-neutral body, ready for precise dancing anywhere and everywhere. We will begin by examining our individual warm-ups, thinking about how we tune ourselves to participate in specific situations. Larger movement will be explored in improvisation exercises, experimenting with vision, visibility and sensory awareness. An aim of these exercises is to perform with others in complete unison with eyes closed. The goal of the class is to achieve clarity and simplicity while moving through the complexities of the many in/visible and un/known structures that surround us, the people that are near us, and of how we think we dance.
MGM Biographies:
Modern Garage Movement (aka MGM) was started with four performances in a one-car garage summer 2005. The interest was in making work not in a studio; the garage rehearsals prompted ideas of a band and driving, so of course MGM went on tour. The first tour worked with the idea of a garage as a theater - using a blank space to create a production with a specific set that the dance depended on - but that wasn’t wholly efficient or mobile. Now MGM is outfitted with just a few lights, extension cords, a bose dock, cute dancing sandals, and the ability to dance a dance piece anywhere, anytime. No space is ever blank, every existing structure can be interesting, bodies are mobile, our dance is mobile. We create stable and healthy relationships with incalculable forces.
MGM Titles
2008 – New Gree (West and East Coast Tour)
2007 – THIS DANCE IS CALLED GREE. IT IS FROM BEDSTUY. (West and East Coast Tour)
2006 – MAYNARD (West Coast Tour)
2005 – MAYNARD, Paul Newman (San Francisco)
Born and raised a ballerina in Missouri, Felicia Ballos is now a Brooklyn based artist making dances. Her work focuses on the experience of the inevitable nature that reveals itself purely through the capricious gaps in the attempts towards order. Ballos’ collaborative projects, performances and installations have been presented in art galleries, theaters, in forests, and other public spaces throughout New York City, at Art Basel in Miami, and internationally in Japan, Morocco, France, and Belgium. Ballos has an ongoing collaboration with Flora Wiegmann and has worked within many other influential partnerships including those with Richard Aldrich, Anna Craycroft, Katie Eastburn, Nancy Garcia, Amy Granat, Montgomery Knott, Robert McNeill and Mark Morgan. As a performer, Ballos has toured with Modern Garage Movement (06 and 07), danced with Rebecca Brooks, Heather Kravas, Jmy Leary, WIL SWANSON/ DANCEWORKS, and White Oak Dance Theater.
Biba Bell is a dancer/artist/scholar. She likes to consider the encounters between people, objects and spaces as interstices between choreographies and improvisations, both in the studio and out. As a performer she has danced for Jmy Leary, Nancy Garcia, Mel Wong, Joshua Zimmermann, Kathleen Hermesdorf, David Hurwith, Kaya Nati, and her sister Gelsey Bell. She makes work under the moniker URISOV and has been involved with AUNTS and MGM since 2004. Biba is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at NYU, working under the mentorship of Andre Lepecki. Biba grew up in Sebastopol, CA. (www.urisov.com) (www.bibayoga.org)
Jmy/JM/Jm/Jbird/Jamm Leary lives and works in Brooklyn. She has danced with Biba Bell, Felicia Ballos, luciana achugar, Mel Wong Dance Company, Merce Cunningham 2nd Company, Nancy Garcia, Nancy Meehan Dance Co., Dance by Neil Greenberg, Walter Dunderville. She has designed costumes for Anna Sperber, John Jasperse, luciana achugar, RoseAnne Spradlin. She produces AUNTS is dance events.
www.moderngaragemovement.com
www.myspace.com/moderngaragemovement
10 Tiny Dances
August 2, 3-6 pm South Waterfront
Linda Austin will again be a part of 10 Tiny Dances, produced this time as part of the on going series of events in Portland's newest neighborhood, South Waterfront. Each dance will be performed ten times, starting every fifteen minutes, in various locations throughout the neighborhood.
Sixth Annual Richard Foreman Mini-Festival
August 15 and 16, 8:30 pm
Frozen
Music II: The City Dance of Lawrence & Anna
Halprin
Sunday, September 14, 2008, performances at 1:00 & 4:00
Third Angle New Music Ensemble with choreographers Linda Austin, Linda
K Johnson, Tere Mathern, Cydney Wilkes
Keller Fountain, Downtown Portland
Curated by Ron Blessinger, Randy Gragg and Linda K Johnson
* This event is free and open to the public and is the final event of
PICA's 2008 TBA Festival
In 1971, Portland christened a new urban park that New York Times architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable heralded as "the most important urban space since the Renaissance." Called Forecourt Fountain (later renamed Keller Fountain), it was part of a sequence of Portland plazas that combined water, sculptural form, and public space in ways never before tried in a city—or in the field of landscape architecture. Yet the plazas were merely one outgrowth of the daring experiments in movement, sound, and space being conducted by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin; his wife, the legendary choreographer Anna Halprin; and radical musical composers such as Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, and Morton Subotnick.
Third Angle New Music Ensemble along with a quartet of Portland's most accomplished choreographers, will celebrate the plazas and the artistic milieu from which they emerged. As the second in its series of "Frozen Music" performances sited in landmark works of architecture, Third Angle will play some of the early forms of Minimalist music pioneered by the composers in the Halprins' circle. In consort, the choreographers will explore Anna Halprin’s philosophy and her intense blend of movement with social and personal consciousness often cited as the beginning of postmodernism in dance.
"We were trying to invent new languages of dance, music, and architecture," Lawrence Halprin recalls of the time. So, too, will City Dance attempt a new kind of celebration of architectural and creative heritage.
City Dance is Oregon's 2008 American Masterpieces project funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, and the Oregon Arts Commission, along with the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Portland Development Commission, Regional Arts & Culture Council, Czopek & Erdenberger, TVA Architects, the Architecture Foundation of Oregon and other partners.
Photo: Alicia J Rose