Dec. 13-17 || a world, a world

Photo: Chelsea Petrakis

work-in-progress by Linda Austin Dance
December 13-17, 2017
Wednesday-Sunday at 7:30pm
Tickets $10-25 in advance https://a-world.brownpapertickets.com
$15 at the door
Arts for All: $5 tickets available for Oregon Trail Card members. Click HERE for info, email info@pwnw-pdx.org to reserve.

Sunday After-Party!
If you attend the show on Sunday Dec. 17, please join us for yummy snacks on us
at Bar Carlo immediately after the show! No-host bar.

a world, a world invites audiences into a hyperactive landscape saturated by shards of movement, image, and language, a tumult that stutters and sputters out, yielding to a more spacious, minimal, and meditative world. Performed for an intimate audience in an extravagantly immersive environment designed by Linda Austin and Sarah Marguier, this work is the culminating chapter in (Un)Made, a body of work investigating the limits of personhood. In 2015 the (Un)Made Solo Relay began as a solo passed along from performer to performer as in a game of telephone, a series taking place over 6 months. In November 2016, the second chapter, the last bell rings for you, gathered 18 participants with varying levels of performance experience to learn and perform a work that, through informal rituals, texts, songs and interactions with everyday objects, generated a web of transitory community relationships that were both celebrated and mourned. For a world, a world, nine performers who have been working with Austin throughout the trajectory of (Un)Made channel impulses generated from the cultural content that surrounds, passes through and constitutes all of us, until released to luxuriate in a space of emptiness, attention and devotion. Throughout, the lure of performing is tested, resisted, and embraced.

Choreographed by Linda Austin in collaboration with the cast
Sound design by Seth Nehil
Visual design and costumes by Sarah Marguier
Set design by Linda Austin
Set construction by Seth Nehil
Lighting design by Jeff Forbes
Performed by Austin, claire barrera, jin camou, Nancy Ellis, keyon gaskin, Jen Hackworth, Allie Hankins, Danielle Ross, Noelle Stiles, and Takahiro Yamamoto. Only five of the dancers will perform each night, in a rotating cast.

Thank you to On the Boards’ NW New Works and the Risk/Reward Festival of New Performance for the chance to try out the beginnings of this work. Thank you to the 2017 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Merce Cunningham Award, without which this project may have been abandoned or postponed indefinitely.

BIOS:

Linda Austin deploys movement, sound, objects, text, and visuals to create non-linear, poetic works laced with an eccentric wit, teetering on the edge between the immediately apprehensible and resolutely mysterious. She is the co-founder and Artistic & Executive Director of Performance Works NorthWest, a catalyst and presenter of projects by both local and visiting artists. Her work has been presented at venues and festivals such as Danspace Project and Performance Space 122 in New York, On the Boards’ NW New Works, PICA’s TBA Festival, and the Contemporary Dance Festival of Michoacán. She has participated in residencies at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program and Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, and her work has been supported by the Regional Arts & Culture Council, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, and Movement Research. Austin’s writing has appeared in The Movement Research Performance Journal, Tierra Adentro (Mexico), the literary journal FO A RM, and Women, Art & Technology (MIT Press, 2003). She is grateful to have been the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (1992), the Oregon Arts Commission (2005), and the Regional Arts & Culture Council (2014), and most especially and eternally, the 2017 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts Merce Cunningham Award, which has made this last chapter of (Un)Made possible.

Jeff Forbes, co-founder of Performance Works NorthWest, designs lights for Linda Austin, Tahni Holt, Takahiro Yamamoto, NW Dance Project and Ate9. He is also technical director for White Bird and Performance Works NW and proud papa of cats Delaney and Delilah.

Sarah Marguier, born in Paris, and currently based in Portland, has worked as a costume, set, and visual designer with choreographers and directors world-wide, plus touring recently with Bruce Springsteen. sarahmarguier.com

Seth Nehil is a sound and video artist. He makes concerts, performances, video installations, original scores for dance and theater and albums of experimental music. Seth has worked with Linda Austin Dance on several previous projects, including Circus Me Around (2007) and the co-directed Bandage A Knife (2009). sethnehil.artdocuments.org