SCUBA National Touring Network for Dance, now in its eighth year, is a
co-operative enterprise which supports the growth and expansion of the
country’s next generation of contemporary dance artists through touring and the
development of relationships with other artists and presenters. The consortium
of sister cities includes Philadelphia Dance Projects, SCUBA founders Velocity
Dance Center of Seattle, ODC Theater in San Francisco and The Southern Theater
in Minneapolis. From the beginning, SCUBA has met the ambitious goal of
supporting tours for regionally established and nationally emerging artists to
and from the participating cities. The PDP Presents 2010 SCUBA program will feature The BodyCartography Project, Megan Mazarick and Jacinta Vlach/Liberation Dance Theatre.
“A kind of Whitney Biennial of dance, this mobile showcase taps the
country’s best emerging talent… and sends them on the road.” – Minnesota Monthly
Minneapolis | The BodyCartography
Project | Jump
Dance
and video artists Olive Bieringa and
Otto Ramstad, co-directors of The
BodyCartography Project, present Jump –
an exercise in tracking ones attention: focus, breath, physical sensation,
boredom, sound, excitement, physical discomfort, joy, sweat, exhaustion. It is
an experiment in endurance and decay. A dance of the autonomic nervous system.
A video of BodyCartography’s site-specific work will also be screened on this
shared bill.
San Francisco | Jacinta Vlach/Liberation Dance Theatre | Animal Farm
Inspired by George Orwell’s classic 20th
century novella of the same title, Animal Farm explores the
infrastructure of contemporary politics and propaganda. Blending images of
revolutionary poster art as evocative visual narrative, the performance examines how a utopian society is made impossible
by the corrupting nature of the very power necessary to create it. Using
various dance forms including Step, Dancehall, Jazz, and Urban Contemporary, Animal
Farm brings together an eclectic fusion of fine art and working-class sensibilities.
The performance features music by Abdullah Ibrahim.
Philadelphia | Megan Mazarick | Avatard (excerpt)
Avatard
combines choreographer Megan Mazarick’s
adolescent love of fantasy and science fiction with her current passion for
creating inventive movement vocabularies. The dance theater narrative explores
video game fandom, astronomy, science fiction and pop culture. In the excerpted
work, audiences will follow the plight of sci-fi video vixens Soul Burner and
Tetris (Megan Mazarick and Alex Holmes), as they are manipulated and controlled
by two unseen gamers. At once campy and absurd, Avatard evokes the feeling of low-fi, B-grade science fiction of
the 1950s, and features music from Dr. Who, World of Warcraft, and Star Trek,
among others.
