Friday, March 19, 2010 – 7:30pm Saturday, March 20, 2010 – 2:30pm
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.
Artists
The BodyCartography Projecthttp://www.bodycartography.org
Dance and video artists Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad co-direct The BodyCartography Project. Their work investigates the physical resonance of space in urban, wild, domestic and social landscapes through dance, video and installation work both locally and internationally.
Works have appeared in festivals internationally most recently at PanCreas Festival, Denmark, Stromereien Festival, Zurich, Anti-Contemporary Art Festival, Finland, Coil Festival, Performance Space 122, DTW as well as a large site commission in the UK. They are featured in a new book Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Space from the University of Florida Press. Recent projects include the curation of the Walker Art Center’s Choreographer’s Evening and performance tour of the Dan Graham exhibit and an installation of ½ Life at Art of This Gallery in Minneapolis. Recent awards include Artists of the Year 2008 from Minneapolis City Pages, Public Art St Paul Sustainable Arts Fellows and a Sage Award for Outstanding Performance in 2008. In 2006 aWalker Art Center commission also won them a Sage Award. They will be presented in the 2010 Scuba National Touring Network for Dance roster in Minneapolis and Philadelphia and have a commission for the Lyon Opera Ballet in June 2010. Olive Bieringa is also the co-founder and curator of SEEDS Festival which takes place annually at Earthdance in Massachusetts.- HideMegan Mazarickhttp://www.mazaricknation.com
Megan Mazarick received her BFA in dance from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and her MFA in dance from Temple University. She has produced shows in the 2005, 2006, and 2007 Philly Fringe.
Her choreography has been presented at Silkwerks Theatre Outlet (Allentown, PA), Glue Dance Series 2006 (Philadelphia), CEC’s New Edge Mix Series 2008 (Philadelphia), and as a resident artist for nEW Festival 2007–2008 (Philadelphia), Bickett Gallery (North Carolina), at Goose Route Dance Festival (West Virginia), and Dance New Amsterdam (New York). In 2009 she became a resident artist for the Community Education Center’s New Edge Residency Program. Megan taught for four years at Temple University and is currently adjunct faculty at Rowan University. She is also a dance filmmaker.- HideJACINTA VLACH
San Francisco native, Jacinta Vlach is the artistic director and founder of Liberation Dance Theater (LDT), a dance-theater collective rooted in ideologies of social change through artistic expression and community outreach.
After graduating from San Francisco School of the Arts and training with Reginald Ray-Savage, Vlach furthered her formal dance training through North Carolina School of the Arts and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center (Cert. of Dance Alumni). While in New York she danced in works choreographed by Reginald Yates, Sean Curran, Max Luna III, Alvin Ailey and others. She has toured and performed with Nathan Trice/RITUALS, Robert Moses Kin, PHILADANCO, Kamal Sinclair’s off-Broadway show the Beat and had the pleasure of performing in the Ronald K. Brown/Nick Cave Soundsuit collaboration at YBCA SF. Jacinta Vlach/Liberation Dance Theater has performed nationwide including: E-Moves Harlem Stage NYC, Multi-Ethnic Americans Chicago Center for the Performing Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Living Word Festival, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, SCUBA National Touring Network for Dance 2010 (Philadelphia and Seattle), and she was recently selected as a finalist in Sadlers Well’s Global Dance Contest. Vlach is the recipient of a Fellowship from Instituto Sacatar for a two-month residency in Brazil (2010), a Theater Bay Area Cash Grant, two Zellerbach Family Foundation Grants (2007, 2009), a Puffin Foundation Grant, and SFAC’s Innovative Partnerships. She is currently Resident Artist of ODC Theater in San Francisco.- Hide