Feb 22-24 ║ Alembic Artists Showcase

After working in the PWNW studio for the past year, the Alembic Resident Artists Fernanda D’Agostino & Sophia Emigh & Jaleesa Johnston, KT Kusmaul, and Olivia Camfield are ready to share their work. Join us for a diverse showing of experimental performance-based work, with a reception to following the Friday night performance, and a talk-back after the Sunday matinee.

three new performance works

February 22-24, 2019
Friday* & Saturday at 8pm
Sunday at 3pm*
LIMITED SEATING: Advance ticket purchase advised
Tickets $12-20, https://alembic.bpt.me
Arts for All: info here

Funded in part by the Regional Arts & Culture Council

IN/BODY

Working with projection installation and performance, In/Body (Nanda D’Agostino, Sophia Emigh, and Jaleesa Johnston) marries technology and live movement to explore the cyclical nature of simultaneously invoking and healing ancestral trauma through the body. Our integration of sound, projection installation and live performance taps into a liminal space that creates an immersive environment for the viewers and performers, making the journey of pain and healing visceral. The project of In/Body speaks to experimentation with performance and movement where the line between the stage and life is unclear, and where the rituals of movement and the body are privileged as sources of self-inquiry, knowledge and transformation.

KT KUSMAUL / BODY HOME FAT DANCE

Weighted Bodies explores the way in which the emotional landscape is enacted upon the terrain of our fatness. Evocative movements—highlighting jiggles, ripples, folds, mass, momentum, softness—codify in movement the multidimensional meanings of fat in motion and the transformative nature of fat in community.

PERFORMERS: KT Kusmaul, Tara Blaine, Mickey Pollizatto, Connie Bowers, Sara Hass, Jodi MahnkeVanHuss, Francie Nevill, Kamryn Fall, Riley Lozano MUSIC: Mickey Pollizatto

OLIVIA CAMFIELD

there wasn’t any so next door sat away: We are your future. Welcome to the protection. Gratitude, prayer in motion. hvwecetv. May we bless this land, coming from all corners of Turtle Island. nene. YOU are on Indian land, you are on Indian time. We are not linear. fettv.

PERFORMERS

Kayla Banks – African-American, Choctow || Celeste Camfield – Mvskoke (Creek) || Olivia Camfield – Mvskoke (Creek) || Victoria Perez – Mexica Indigena

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

IN/BODY ARTISTS: Fernanda D’Agostino has completed over forty commissions and installations, many incorporating moving images in novel ways. She has received Open Signal’s New Media Fellowship, The Bronson; Oregon Arts Commission and Flintridge Foundation Fellowships and funding from the NEA, Warhol Foundation and Ford Family Foundation. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. A central concern of her work is the notion of the viewer as active participant in a prepared environment. Fernanda’s recent installation “Generativity” investigated our bodies’ intersections with nature in crisis and combined new media, sound and live performance to immerse viewers in an ever-shifting dreamscape.

Sophia Wright Emigh is an interdisciplinary artist working in film, photography, performance, embodied practice, and participatory work that frames individual and collective agency. Sophia plays with the themes of home, the void, stillness in motion, queerness, felt ancestry, transmutation of lineage, quantum observation, the rhizome, wilderness, the inner territory, and the common space inside whirling dervishes, hurricanes, and black holes. She holds a BA in Theater Studies from Yale University, works in Portland, OR, and feels her roots in the mountains, the moss, and the water.

Jaleesa Johnston is a mixed media artist working in Portland, OR. She holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work explores the ruptured and queer existence of the black female body as both subject and object through performance, video, photography, sculpture and collage. Working with her body as material, Jaleesa uses its malleability and symbolism to conjure new narratives that suggest blackness as a liminal site for personal and communal transformation. She is particularly concerned with articulating gestures of the body as a fragmented language that can be used to voice narratives of fugitivity, resistance and freedom.

KT Kusmaul is the founder of Body Home Fat Dance. Initially created as a weekly dance class, it has been growing in scope and depth to develop and support a community of fat dancers. They are creating a nuanced dialogue about body-positivity, exploring their own relationships to bodies and experimenting with healing through embodiment. KT has been working to expand this phenomenon through mentoring of new movement teachers and to bring this otherwise personal experience to an audience.

Olivia Camfield is an Enrolled Muscogee Creek Tribal member from The Texas Hill Country where she started her training at the age of two at a small local studio. She was trained directly by Limon teacher Joe Alegado, completed the MODAS Dance Year Long Training Program, was a company member with PDX Contemporary Ballet, and is currently dancing with the Contemporary Indigenous dance company Dancing Earth under the artistic direction of Rulan Tangen. In 2017 Olivia performed on tour with Dancing Earth in the show “Seeds Rejuvenation” at the Mesa Performing Arts Center in Mesa, AZ, in the show “500 Years of Resistance” at the Brava! Theater in San Francisco, and participated in many community outreach days where she would teach dance to Native youth and healing movement at rehabilitation centers. In Olivia’s personal work she focuses on the intricacies between indigenous identity and the missing and murdered Native American women. Olivia created and performed “Which Way Is Up I’ve Never Been Here Before” in Portland, OR, a solo exploring the notion of letting pure emotion and energy from current and intergenerational trauma take form all at once on stage. Olivia currently lives in Portland, OR where she is a freelancer and continues to work with Dancing Earth.