On July 19th-21st 2018, Performance Works NW and FLOCK Dance Center have collaborated to bring, in part, artist Shannon Stewart’s Screaming Traps from New Orleans and Tahni Holt’s Rubble Bodies for a shared evening of dance performance.
BUY TICKETS HERE: https://relatives-rubblebodies.bpt.me
RELATIVES: a movement and light meditation on the (in)visibility of identities by The screaming traps (Shannon Stewart and Ellery Burton).
RELATIVES is a movement and light meditation on the (in)visibility of identities - seen, felt, heard, remembered, presented, and "repeated to form what appears a natural being." or a relative one. or two relatives.
A meditation on objectification performed as a dance duet.
Sprung from years of research in performativity of identity and textures of femininity, the Screaming Traps (Shannon Stewart and Ellery Burton) don’t know exactly what is happening but they are curious. They watch you watch them. They appear and disappear. They change. They communicate. They subconsciously ask you to participate in unmaking what is objectified and objectifiable while still asking to be seen.
Rubble Bodies (work-in-progress): Made in collaboration with composer Luke Wyland, visual artist Elizabeth Malaska and performers Willis Ross (New Orleans) and Holland Andrews (Holland will not be performing in July’s performance).
Rubble Bodies is a collapse before a beginning to stage a liminal place in-between something that has ended and something about to start. In this space, the labored body, the breath, voice, and weight of a body come into sharp focus. Rubble Bodies resides in a world that knows it is being watched and performs unabashed performance.
Bits of ourselves we rock into a kaleidoscope of expression.
BIO:
Shannon Stewart is a choreographic artist who splits her time between New Orleans and Europe. Her company Screaming Traps explores the intersection of dance practices, embodied identities and social choreographies. Shannon has an MFA in Interdisciplinary Performance from Tulane University and a BA in Urban Design from the University of Washington. She's proposed an open source method called Body Based Theory Practice and presented this research in dance symposiums in the US and Europe.
Shannon’s performative work has been presented by the Work Room (ATL), Catapult/Definitive Figures Feminist Performance Festival, Marigny Opera House, IDOCDE at ImpulsTanz (Vienna), On The Boards, the Risk/Reward Festival, Velocity Dance Center, Movement Research (NYC), Pivot Arts (Chicago), Cowles Center (Minneapolis), Philadelphia Dance Projects, as well as in parades, living rooms, bars, film houses, galleries, and online. Shannon is fortunate to be sharing work in the PNW because she is a member of the "oh shit bermuda triangle" which proposes radical non-symmetrical (reciprocated) advocacy.
Tahni Holt is a choreographer and founding director of FLOCK Dance Center based in Portland OR, who has been creating performances, programing and teaching for the past nineteen years.
Holt’s creative practice follows her curiosities by asking questions that demand rigorous specificity yet remain open to a terrain of inquiry – inviting rather than prescribing interpretation. She actively uses her intuition, improvisational forms, collaborations with performers and other makers, her ongoing somatic practice, and any other thing that she obsesses about, to create work. Holt is fascinated with how audiences see what performers do onstage, and she is always trying to research the complexity of this relationship. Her work deals with perceptions of both audience and performer—always with the desire to never quite reside in certainty. Holt’s work holds space for complex organizations of meaning making with the desire to confuse easily digested norms.
Holt’s choreography has been presented throughout the United States at venues including On The Boards (Seattle), Fusebox Festival (Austin), and The Lucky Penny (Atlanta), and PICA’s TBA Festival (Portland). Holt is a 2007 Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship recipient, and in 2010 was curated into the PORTLAND 2010 Biennial. She has had the pleasure of being an artist-in-residence in many places around the world. Residencies include work in Anchorage, Boise, Atlanta, Walla Walla, France, and Greece; in 2013 the Suitcase Fund of New York Live Arts supported her residency with Bucharest choreographer Madalina Dan in Romania. Holt is a 2014-2015 NDP Touring Award recipient for Duet Love, which toured to Velocity Dance (Seattle), Pica’s TBA Festival and DiverseWorks (Houston). Last winter, 2017, WhiteBird Dance premiered Holt’s latest work, Sensation/Disorientation. Most recently Sensation/Disorientation headed to Bulgaria through American Dance Abroad (ADA) and One Foundation for Culture and the Arts for their joint endeavor: Spotlight, USA platform in the spring of 2018.