Performance Works NorthWest Alembic Co-Production Series presents
GHOSTS + Snake Talk
February 26th & 27th, 2016 at 8:00 pm
Performance Works NorthWest presents a double bill of guest artist performances and workshops curated by Allie Hankins: GHOSTS by Asaf Aharonson & Ruairí Donovan (Berlin) and Snake Talk by Abby Crain, Maryanna Lachman and Mara Poliak (Oakland).
WORKSHOPS taught by these artists will be held at FLOCK on Thursday February 25 and Saturday February 27
WHAT: GHOSTS + Snake Talk
WHO: Asaf Aharonson & Ruairí Donovan (Berlin) and Abby Crain (Oakland)
WHEN: February 26 & 27 at 7:30 PM
WHERE: Performance Works NorthWest: 4625 SE 67th Ave.Portland, OR 97206
TICKETS: $12 in advance at brownpapertickets.com/event/2494417 or $15 at the door
TWO DIFFERENT SHOWS FOR $20! Upon purchasing your ticket, you’ll get a code to buy a discounted ticket for $8 for Cabaret Boris & Natasha on Feb. 19 & 20!
This program is supported in part by the Multnomah County Cultural Coalition || Oregon Cultural Trust.
Snake Talk at Performance Works NW was made possible with support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant
Mmm, ok?” “So?” “It’s about the bear.” “Which bear? The big bear? The star constellation? The homosexual archetype?” “No the bear that is waiting.”
Drawing on the work of theorist Michael Hardt, GHOSTS stems from the confidential to the indecent, traveling from the erotic to the pornographic and back again to friendship. Veiling and unveiling the potential of a complex intimacy between two lovers, asking “how love can be the central, constitutive mode and motor of politics.”
Snake Talk is created and performed by Abby Crain, Maryanna Lachman and Mara Poliak, with lighting design by Elizabeth Ardent and sound design by Samuel Hertz. In Snake Talk, the female subject remains slippery and undefinable within an aesthetic terrain of discomfort, excess and distortion. We are are dense, opulent, dazzling, awkward, seductive, repulsive, terrifying. We ooze, leak, wander, tie ourselves in a knot, rip apart at the seams. We have forgotten the difference between kissing and eating.
WORKSHOPS at FLOCK Dance Center
8371 N Interstate Ave. Studio 4 | Portland, OR 97212
Luminous Annihilation/Clear Eyes: Led by Abby Crain
WHEN: February 25, 6:30-8:45 pm COST: $12-15 sliding scale.
We become luminous; we open our eyes. We are still seeking transparency. We are still welcoming abandon. We allow things to move through us. As soon as we find what we are doing we release it to allow it to transform and shift into something else. We release ourselves and allow ourselves to shift and transform! Or maybe we don’t! Okay let’s face it, if we are open to joyful annihilation, we can’t actually predict what will happen, so let’s not. By the way, this time we will work with our eyes.
We will see things, and things will see us. We invoke thunderstorms and start fires. We dance. We rest. We dance again.
PLAYGROUND GHOSTS: Led by Asaf Aharonson & Ruairí Donovan
WHEN: Saturday February 27, 1:00-3:00 pm COST: FREE
Using the practice of moving in order to get to know each other better we will make a playground of our duet GHOSTS to welcome you. In this workshop/playground we will move abruptly between dancing for each other and other activities such as reading, drawing and discussion. How can we use dancing the private to unfold the body in public?
BIOS
Asaf Aharonson was born outside Jerusalem. A recent graduate of the BA Dance & Choreography program of the H.Z.T., Berlin. Aharonson has collaborated and performed with Peter Plyer, Mia Habib, Hana Erdman, Iris Erez, Tami Lebovits and Arkadie Zidas among others. Through his art practice he aims to prioritize the spending of time with others as the primary site for the generation of material for live performance.
Asaf’s mom, Bosmat, is a gardener. She was born in the south and still often thinks about the desert.
Ruairí Donovan is a performance maker working between choreography, live art and theater. His work aims to offer dramaturgies of participation while queering expectations of the performing body as well as the live theatrical event. He splits his time between Cork, Ireland and Berlin, Germany. His award winning work has been widely presented across Europe and Northern America at Cork Midsummer Festival, Tiger Dublin Fringe Festival, Project Arts Centre (IRL), Chapter Arts Centre, Buzzcutt (UK), CounterPulse, Abrons (USA), and Tanztage, Uferstudios & Dock 11 (DE). He is a core member of Keith Hennessy’s Turbulence, which has been presented at NYLA, YBCA, PICA TBA, Kampnagel, HAU and Theatre der Welt .
Ruairí’s mother; Mary, lives in Ireland where she is a devoted Grandmother, occasional wheelchair user and believer in the guardianship of Angels.
Abby Crain is an Oakland based artist who makes dances, teaches, writes, curates and performs. Her work has been presented in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, NYC, and Berlin. She worked with Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People from 2001-2009, and has danced in various capacities with Sara Shelton Mann since 1999. She has also had the pleasure of performing in the work of David Dorfman, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Guillermo Gomez Peña, and Jess Curtis, to name a few. She has taught through Movement Research NYC, teaches annually in Dos Rios California with Sara Shelton Mann, at the FRESH Festival, and recently, at Ponderosa Tanzland in Stolzenhagen, Germany. She has studied Open Source Forms with Stephanie Skura since 2009, and was certified to teach the work in 2014. She is engaged in an ongoing research and teaching collaboration with Margit Galanter under the moniker Art Workouts, and an ongoing dialogue about language and movement with Oakland poet David Buuck. abbycrain.net
Maryanna Lachman is a dancer, installation artist and curator based in Oakland, CA. She is a co-curator of the annual FRESH Festival and a visiting artist at Whitman College, Beloit College, Green Street Studios (Boston), and Dance New Amsterdam (NYC). Lachman works as a collaborative performer in works constructed by Minna Harri, Sara Shelton Mann, Kathleen Hermesdorf and Christine Bonansea. She attended ImPulsTanz as part of the danceWEB residency in 2012 and received a California NextGen artist grant the same year. Maryanna is one of the seven women of SALTA, a collective of dance curators in the East Bay. In 2014, SALTA presented their paper Pseudo-, Anti-, and Total Dance: on Curating an Experimental Dance Series, at “Envisioning the Practice: Montréal International Symposium on Curating the Performing Arts”. That paper was recently published in Critical Correspondence in NYC and will be published this fall by the Université de Montréal, as part of an anthology on curatorial practice. Lachman is invested in community organizing, in creating trans-disciplinary platforms for discussion surrounding practice and making cultural space for dance experiments to flourish. maryannalachman.info
Mara Poliak is a dancer, curator, artist, and writer based in Oakland. She is currently working with Margit Galanter in her Cave Forms project, and has been a collaborative performer in works by Bay Area choreographers including Tessa Wills, Macklin Kowal, Jess Curtis, and Jesse Hewit. Mara has recently shown her solo and collaborative work in SF, LA, NYC, Seattle, and Portland, was a guest artist at Whitman College in Washington, and an artist-in-residence at Pieter PASD (LA), CounterPulse, Starline Social Club, Subterranean Arthouse, and Culver Center for the Arts (Riverside). She is a member of SALTA, a 7-woman collective that curates a free monthly mobile performance series in the East Bay. Mara has been a teaching artist for the past seven years at Creativity Explored, a studio in San Francisco for adult artists with developmental disabilities. Her practice is invested in collaboration, feminisms, curation that addresses intersectionality, and natural / cultural spaces. mara.space
Elizabeth Ardent is a lighting designer, performer & landyke living in Oakland, California. She has held residencies in San Francisco, Los Angeles, rural Germany & the Florida Keys. Elizabeth is a member of SALTA, a collective of dancers who curate a roving series of experimental performance. She works as the Production Manager for the Mills College Dance & Theater Department.
Samuel Hertz, composer and performer, received his MFA at Mills College, where he studied composition and electronic music with Pauline Oliveros, Fred Frith, and Zeena Parkins. He has worked with numerous dance companies throughout the United States, and his work has been seen/heard at ACUD MACHT NEU (Berlin, Germany), Nebulullaby (London, UK), ACRE Gallery/ACRE-TV (Chicago, IL), ARTX (Long Beach, CA), Jack Straw New Media Gallery (Seattle, WA), Harvestworks (New York, NY), The Uncreativity Festival (Minneapolis, MN), and WBEZ Radio (Chicago, IL) among others. Samuel has worked as lead technical assistant to, and performed with, Morton Subotnick, Alvin Curran, and John Driscoll. Currently, he composes music for a number of San Francisco Bay-area choreographers, in addition to working on an electro-acoustic composition commission by the OpusCentrum Ensemble (Bourges, France). Recently, he was an artist-in-residence at Bains::Connective in Brussels, Belgium. samhertzsound.com
Performance Works NW ||Linda Austin Dance 
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