Abigail Levine in Distance Measures

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

I’ll be performing in Third Rail Projects’ Then She Fell through the end of September.

April 14, 23, 26 and 30

May 5, 7-12, 19, 22-26, and 28

June 5, 8, 18-22, 25 and 27

July 18-21, 23 and 24

August 10-11, 20-22 and 28-31

September 1, 10-14 and 28-29

Off to Hartford Stage for the world premiere of Big Dance Theater’s Man in a Case, starring Mikhail Baryshnikov.  See you in 6 weeks!

In rehearsal with Chris Giarmo, Tei Blow and Mikhail Baryshnikov (photo by Leslie Lyons)

I’m incredibly grateful to have worked with such an illustrious group of artists in 2012:

Abigail Levine
Amber Sloan
Baryshnikov Productions
Big Dance Theater (Annie-B Parson/Paul Lazar)
Christopher Williams
David Gordon
David Parker
Dean Moss
Doug Elkins
Faye Driscoll
John-Mark Owen
Lauren Petty/Shaun Irons
Michou Szabo
OtherShore/Jodi Melnick
Phantom Limb Company (Jessica Grindstaff/Erik Sanko)
Steven Reker

Thank you all for a spectacular year!

And thank you to Sarah Maxfield (One-Shot, In and Out of Uniform/Museum of Art and Design, Late-Nite Cabaret @ FLICFest/Irondale Center), TOPAZ ARTS, 92Y Fridays at Noon, and Movement Research at the Judson Church for supporting the creation and development of my own work.

Here’s to a terrific 2013.

XOXOXO

Faye Driscoll: You’re Me

January 18, 2013 – January 20, 2013
Abrons Arts Center Playhouse
Part of American Realness 2013

TICKETS: $20

Buy Tickets

Faye Driscoll’s You’re Me considers how we are constantly made-up and un-done by each other. In this evening-length duet, Driscoll probes and obfuscates the inescapable nature of relationship as the contemporary, archetypal, fantastical, and personal crash into each other, bending and warping in one shrug, quarrel, or reframing of a scene. Imbued with the adrenaline of potentially dire consequences, You’re Me is a moving portrait of the impossible struggle to unhinge the palindromic loop of self and other.

With the constraint of just two performers on stage the whole time, Driscoll and performer Aaron Mattocks fight a sweaty, evocative, disturbing, and deeply funny battle with the dualism they face; male/female, director/performer, and performer/audience. They ask: What do you see when you see us on stage? How does our very desire to be more than we are transform us? How do our fantasies of ourselves and of each other create new possibilities for being, and yet give birth to friction, failure, and loss? You’re Me is a kind of tango with chaos and recurrence in which the performers attempt to simultaneously control and destroy the frame through which they are seen — all the while asking, “Am I getting it right?”

Performance dates:
Friday, January 18 | 7 pm
Saturday, January 19 | 9 pm
Sunday, January 20 | 4 pm

Run time: 1 hour and 20 minutes

Photo by Steven Schreiber