Abigail Levine
Distance Measures and As Sugar Loaves Train Horses
Saturday, June 15   8:00 pm / Tickets $20

Performed in darkness, lit only by moving LED candles, Distance Measures (2012) borrows elements from mathematical models of chaotic systems. This beautiful, highly structured dance improvisation evolved collaboratively alongside Derek Bermel’s Orbit Design, a musical algorithm inspired by the three-body problem in celestial mechanics.

As Sugar Loaves Train Horses, a work in progress, transposes sections of John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing onto bodies in space. The dance houses movement sentences in which dancers literally mark their movements on the walls and floor. The space, in turn, comes to reflect the particulars of the dancers’ bodies, as well as an accumulation of the performance itself. “Structure is simple because it can be thought out, figured out, measured. It is a discipline which, accepted, in return accepts whatever, even those rare moments of ecstasy, which, as sugar loaves train horses, train us to make what we make.” John Cage, Lecture on Nothing

Choreographer and performer Abigail Levine brings together the rigors and resources of dance’s bodily specificity with performance art’s experiments with time and human action. She has presented her works in the US, Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, and Taiwan. Composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel is Artistic Advisor to the American Composers Orchestra and is currently in residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, NJ and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

Performed by: Carolyn Hall, Abigail Levine and Aaron Mattocks