Dec. 3-6 || Alice Gosti || Protecting the herd

Performance Works NW presents
as part of our Alembic Co-Production Series
Alice Gosti’s Protecting the herd
Dec. 3-5 Thursday-Saturday at 8pm
Dec. 6 Sunday at 2pm
Performance Works NW
4625 SE 67th Ave, Portland, OR

Tickets: $12 in advance at http://herd.brownpapertickets.com
or $15 at the door

Protecting the herd is an immersive live performance by Italian-American choreographer Alice Gosti, in collaboration with Seattle composer Benjamin Marx.

Protecting the herd is the sister performance to Alice’s How to become a Partisan, which premiered at the Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle in April 2015. While the latter was spacious, lasted 5 hours, and featured singer Hanna Benn as the focus, Protecting the herd will last one hour and center on a herd of performers as our focus. Both performances are presented in correspondence with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Italy from the Fascists.

A key element of the performance is a one-hour song cycle, composed by Benjamin Marx (Degenerate Art Ensemble) using recordings from How to become a Partisan. This includes Hanna Benn’s singing (Pollens, Sun-Lux, Boots), songs from the partisan movement of 1943 1945, a traveling chamber choir, an intergenerational community choir, coded Italian WWII radio announcements, timpani, hand bells, and the famous organ of Saint Mark’s Cathedral.

Amiya Brown‘s remarkable lighting design will create a light sculpture that will function as a container for the herd to live in.

The incredible cast of dance artists:
Colleen McNeary, Alyza DelPan-Monley , Brittani Karhoff, Noelle Chun, Lorraine Lau, Kaitlin McCarthy and Amy Ross.

How do we move away from apathy and indifference into resistance? What needs to happen for us to take action? What is the space in which women are allowed/not allowed to exist? These are the timely questions driving Protecting the herd. Gosti, along with her extraordinary Seattle cast, developed choreography using resistance as a physical score, asking questions around What is required to act? and, What if women take the space they want, instead of having to be small and invisible?

Protecting the herd focuses on questions of identity, community, and where art belongs, challenging the canonic boundaries of dance.

–photo by Tim Summers

Protecting the herd was made possible thanks to Velocity Dance Center’s AiR (Artis in Residency) program. 

A PWNW Alembic Co-Production
Made possible with the support of the Fred W. Fields Fund of the Oregon Community Foundation